For people like me
by puzzlepuzzle
Summary: The thing about being nine is that you tend to get played a lot. This is the story of who Uzumaki Kushina was and who she came to be.


**Disclaimer: I own nothing of _Naruto_. Please R&R!**

* * *

**A/N: **

**The title was taken from a line of the first ending song of the animated series, "Wind" by Akeboshi.**

**This took me such a long time to work out, but I figured that I really, really needed to get it done. I considered playing with multiple perspective, but in the end, this is the best version that I've come up with.**

**Enjoy!**

* * *

The thing about being nine is that you get played a lot.

Sure, the village back home is supposedly just like this one where she's been exiled to. They'd assured her that she was just being sent there, but in the first hours of her being in Konohagakure and bawling herself silly in the empty apartment, she knows that it's exile anyway.

Why else would she be singled out from the orphanage and fetched by scary, mask-wearing nin and brought to the Hokage himself for her particulars to be read out?

Still, she's used to being kicked around, so she'll deal, somehow.

When the one picture that she owns is nicely hung on the bit of string that tied her bundle of worldly possessions together, she's about done unpacking.

Then a few hours inch by and she sits at a table and realizes that nobody is coming to this apartment unit, now that the Head's wife, Sarutobi Biwako, has helped her settle in.

She has nothing else to do, not even wait. Waiting is premised on the belief that there's somebody coming, somebody to expect. She doesn't even have that remote improbability now.

So she gets properly furious at how stupid she was. Between the steaming gasps of snot and tears and one of her precious cups of instant ramen, she realizes that she was tricked. They told her that somebody wanted to adopt her in this village— they told her that everybody had her red and horribly straight hair— they told her that she was going to fit right into Konoha.

At nine, she's supposed to be cleverer than this.

She's supposed to be smarter than getting played yet again. Since her parents upped and died like so many of them before she could even form lasting impressions of their faces, she's supposed to know how to avoid the cheaters who got her here.

When you've spent half your life learning how to avoid bullies, you should be better than this.

You've all the right skills to get the best possible deal in a bunk overflowing with children made indistinguishable by missions gone wrong.

You're supposed to be sharper than being booted out and sent to another village, close ties with Uzushiogakure or not.

You're not supposed to believe even the village elders back home.

The family right across the street sees her taking out trash two mornings after that. They immediately see that she's from that poorer, rougher Whirlpool village.

"Oh they have their _Seals_, don't they?"

She blushes violently because she is nine and has understood condescension ever since she could understand a full sentence at all. She defends what hasn't been openly attacked, valiantly trying to explain that the seal system in Uzushiogakure is a beautiful, complex part of their culture— different but nonetheless compatible with the shinobi arts.

They should understand her. You see, the legends about the Kyuubi and her village's seals and the whirlpool insignia on her neighbours' jackets were supposed to speak for themselves.

One hand gripping the trash bags of instant ramen cups and emptied seasoning satchets with her disastrous attempt to cook a bit of meat, she hastily tries to demonstrate.

Her unfortunate verbal tic, developed after years of arguing and fighting to be heard, makes them laugh.

* * *

At night, Kushina weaves something of a nest from the foreign sheets and pillows and cries herself hoarse.

In this new apartment where the acid trace of paint lingers and the lights swing dim and threatening in the hallway, the shame of having the bed sheets suddenly yanked back and the others giggling and pointing at a wet bed is more imagined than real. There is no real deterrence to sniffling and wetting herself at night, so she does it.

It doesn't mean that she is any less ashamed.

Just in case she has forgotten, the family across the street informs her that she's been enrolled into the shinobi academy. Like the oldies back home and the Hokage's wife, they omit details as to who's paying for it.

In addition to the map that Biwako provided her on the evening that she arrived, they give her directions and instruct their kids to walk with her to the academy. They even make her a special cake, cheering her on for her first day at the academy.

The people in Konoha aren't bad, she thinks then.

On her part, she gets herself prepared with the better of her two pinafores and really scrubs herself properly the night before.

Rapt with anticipation, she stays awake that night, making sure to dredge up every single memory of anything that was mentioned about Konoha in her previous home.

* * *

Back home, Konoha wasn't depicted or described this way, red-roofs, roundish facades, bustling market and artisan streets like ants paths to the nest, key gates so carefully patrolled with its core all built up and the whole enterprise surrounded by mountains, a lake shielded by valleys.

At least the older children in the orphanage told the younger ones stories at times, so she isn't too startled by the three faces.

Those loom stoically from a rock façade, glaring down at her as she inches past them, sweat running down the sides of her face from the dizzying summer.

A few dragonflies jet past her into the valleys beyond, but the world seems a little smaller in that space, the gargantuan visages watching over the village that they govern from time memorial into eternity.

She swallows, tries to keep up and tells herself that there's nothing to be in awe of.

In fact, she insists to herself that she's prepared when she does step into the academy. She believes that she knows everything that there is to know about Konoha's Hokages, the shinobi system that they use, the legend surrounding the Valley of the End and the different kinds of clans.

But nobody tries to test her immediately when she enters. Instead, she is met by some instructor who is busy chaperoning others into their classes and sorting out some argument between a bristling, upset girl and her nin-dog and some boy who apparently tried to pull the mutt's tail.

The instructor acts like he's been expecting her— he promptly hands her over to another instructor, who passes her on to yet another one who makes a sound of exasperation and finally hustles her into his class.

She doesn't mind that so much. That much, she's used to.

* * *

Because she is nine and refuses to get played anymore, she tells herself that it is her one chance to get ahead and to make something of herself.

Unfortunately, she also announces it to the rest of her class during her self-introduction.

She declares that she'll be the first female Hokage, because she believes that it will impress them— you always had to be loud and full of bravado if you wanted to be noticed, back home anyway.

In her mind, her introduction sounds alright.

But her ears inform her that the verbal tic squeezes out of her constricted throat. It warps the tail of her sentences and she squints in panic, fists like turtle-shells, fleshy palms squeezing themselves sweaty.

The rest giggle and twitter at the way she speaks. She glares at all of them, trying to silence them even while the instructor holds back his own laughter and warns them to keep quiet.

Then this boy with bright yellow hair gets up, putting a small fist across his chest. "I want to be a great Hokage as well— somebody whom the others will respect and look up too."

She's been around older, hard-hitting kids enough to know that these aren't actually being unfriendly.

But the one thing that she really hated back home was other kids trying to crowd her out and steal the thunder. It's already happening here and she looks down at her feet resentfully.

During recess, a few kids don't go to the yard but crowd around her and ask all sorts of questions and tease her.

"You must be from Uzushiogakure," one says knowingly, looking right at her hair.

"I am." She is proud of it still, fists curled again and ready to defend whatever that she knows of back home.

"Lady Mito has red hair too," a slim girl with dark hair with pretty jet eyes informs her. "Used to. It's kinda purple-grey now though."

"Yours is definitely redder." A boy with his enviably long, smooth blonde ponytail decides.

She doesn't understand why they look at her hair with such amusement— plenty of kids back home had this hair, even if the shade of hers is particularly obtrusive and almost offensive in certain lights.

"My mom says that people with red hair burn in the sun," a sleepy-looking kid says, pleased with himself for offering the bit of trivia. "Do you peel like an orange when you train?"

She frowns, opening her mouth, but a boy with a flicked-up top-knot butts in. "Did you see? In the Historical Halls, there's a portrait of the First Hokage and his wife."

There was definitely some vague legend about Tailed Beasts and she wants to tell it even if she can't remember all the details now.

But she can't find her tongue so easily when everybody is bombarding her with questions. She gets flustered and she tries to answer everybody at the same time and gets all tongue-twisted again.

They laugh.

Another classmate peers at her. "Do people there all look and speak like this?"

"N-No," she manages, stung and reeling back the flopping, thrashing refrain of her tic just in time.

* * *

Then after class, a group of boys surround her, staring at the long, straight red hair that nobody else has.

It makes rage coil hotly in her belly, and she feels wronged because she just can't help looking like the people of her village. It's a small village, yes, but everybody works just as hard as the people in this village.

One pokes fun at how red her hair is and the rest mostly laugh.

"Tomato," he crows, "You're like a tomato! Round face and red hair!"

"Ooh, she's getting redder and riper!"

"Ugh, tomatoes that everybody hates, I don't even want them in my salad!"

One boy reaches out with his brown little paw and tugs at her hair, and that's when everything goes wrong.

She pounces on him, screaming herself red in the face, yelling that it's rude and that she hates tomatoes too, but she'll make him pay for calling her that.

To her, it's not her choice that she was sent here.

She already knows that it was her fault that she woke up and was nine one day; that the orphanage couldn't keep her with a village already struggling to survive. You see, she already knows that it's her fault for not learning enough in those classes, which is why they booted her out to make way for other kids and never bothered telling her that to her face.

She tries to explain, but the words don't come and all she's doing is getting redder.

They continue teasing her, so she just does what she always does best in the end—challenge them to a fight and pummel them into a pulp.

Nobody else is going to help her, not when most kids' parents have come to fetch them and the few who are left milling around are just looking on in amusement at the free show.

But it's okay, she tells herself there and then.

It's okay because nobody ever came to her rescue anyway. It's always been like that and she'll just have to do everything herself.

That much, she's used to.

Even the kid who'd announced that he wanted to be Hokage just sits at his desk with his high-collared friend and when they grin at her, she growls at them.

They flinch, look away and let her get on with what she has to do. She'll give them tomatoes alright.

Back home, winning fights and wrestling was the fastest, most successful way to earn any respect. You see, this makes sense when you have to fight to even be heard, so she beats up those that she can get her hands on now.

Then in the next few minutes, she races the rest to the yard, takes down a few more boys in the process and successfully earns the girls' admiration, the teacher's incredulous anger and her first detention task.

* * *

By the end of the first week in school, she has racked up quite a few scrapes, a long tear down her nicer pinafore, made the teacher turn four different shades of pissed off and been assigned fifty lines for punishment and reflection.

As she pricks herself with a needle and thread that Biwako was kind enough to lend her, she growls and decides that becoming the first female Hokage can take a back seat— she'd rather work on making clones and getting the chakra control right first.

Fortunately, the incident in the yard and the other subsequent pranks that she played has made her all sorts of good friends.

Mikoto, the sweet, fair-skinned girl with the dark hair and eyes, shows her how to embroider patterns similar to the red fan on her sleeves that Kushina admired. Mikoto even presents her a pretty bit of red cloth during recess so that the ripped pinafore can be patched and made to look prettier than ever.

But even as Mikoto giggles and hugs back when Kushina flings herself into her arms and hugs her so tightly that it hurts, her friend tells her it's not allowed for non-Uchihas to wear fan motifs on their clothes and points out the separate section of Konoha that she lives in.

Not that Kushina wants to copy the fan— she retorts that she prefers the whirlpool patterns from back home and insists that living on her own is great, because she does whatever she wants and doesn't have to attend clan meetings all the time.

Like Mikoto, Ten Ru also has her own clan and she goes back on the weekends to meet her relatives. Apparently, they're a really small clan, but Ten Ru says that she, Ten Long and the other members have loads of fun comparing their newly-polished kunai and different kinds of tools and weapon.

Kushina never says it, but she wishes that Ten Ru and Mikoto would invite her along.

* * *

In school, she can't follow the lessons easily.

She wasn't a good student back home either— there were too many cramped into too few chairs, some sitting on the floor, a few loitering by the windows of the four classrooms in the orphanage.

She learned more by running wild with some other kids, picking up how to draw seals by holding sticks in their fingers and tracing on every available surface in sand boxes and mud holes.

There were days of trying to run up tree trunks like cats, kids playing tag while pretending to be grown-up shinobi running with their arms behind them, legs propelling them forward with the winds.

But this village is more prosperous than Uzushiogakure, she'll give them that.

Back home, the meals were always rationed, but here she gets meal coupons and stuffs herself until she cannot shovel in anymore, making her instructor glare and ask if her eyes are bigger than her stomach.

As something of a guardian, Biwako drops by every month with a small allowance and when asked, tells Kushina that she is a permanent guest of this village. That's why Konoha looks after her.

In the Academy, there are beautifully-built, solid square tables and sturdy little wood benches for the students to use during study time. There are enough stationary sets allocated without anyone having to fight over erasers or to draw lots to use the nicer pencil.

Her junior-class instructor is nice enough too, despite his sharp tongue and insistence that everybody toe the line; he has warm eyes and is steady when he demonstrates or explains how to throw the senbon and draws out the hand seals on the big board at the front.

But in the first place, her concentration is lacking and she can't focus during the theoretical sessions. She daydreams, she doodles and she can't resist pulling pranks for a few laughs.

When she tries to do her assignments, she gets impatient. When it's a hot afternoon in class, she falls asleep, tired out by her nights imagining worlds where everything fits and she belongs like the final jigsaw piece that never has to be forced into any crook and corner to simply secure itself its place.

She does try, but she finds it difficult to memorise terminology and written concepts that other kids easily include into their schooling and lingo. Undoubtedly, her basics are all screwed up from the rudimentary, insufficient and often inaccurate tips that the orphanage children picked up and passed between themselves.

The class tests come week after week and she fails far too often and passes only by sheer dumb luck, appearing barely literate when the question demands that she explain the distinction of chakra between a disguise and a clone. Even now, she struggles to unlearn the habits that came from years of misguided practice and often finds herself at the bottom of the class.

She isn't that bad with the practical lessons, but she has no particular talent with senbon, shuriken or anything for that matter. The one thing that she proves good at is outlasting most of her classmates in getting hit and getting up again during sparring practice.

It's weird that she never seems to run out of energy, but there were other kids back home who could last much longer than her when they wrestled or held their breaths under water. Then again, she never wins at kunai-throwing competitions and contests involving the speed of replacement techniques. When called out to answer questions in class, she coins her own terms in those moments of desperate inspiration, annoying the instructor on a daily basis.

Over the next three months, she finds that she does get a bit better at some things, but the examinations to advance to the next class do her in good and proper and she only passes by two marks.

Overall, she decides that she's doing okay, but despite all her trying, she finds no answers to all her questions: why she had to leave her old village, why her new friends never want to stay to play longer when their parents come, why everybody still teases her about her hair, why Biwako never seems to have enough time to stay and chat, why the fish that she was given by a kindly shopkeeper was ruined when she'd followed a recipe; why she had to leave everything back home and come to Konoha.

* * *

There is only one schoolmate with bushy, untamable hair that's somewhat similar to hers.

Akimichi Chouza does not get bullied or called names for it, even when the plump boy with his reddish-brown hair does have some Uzumaki-related fellow in his lineage—some old clan marriage, he mentioned.

He finds her sulking after class one day and offers her a beautifully folded hankie that she doesn't want to take, since she wasn't crying.

He puts it into her hand anyway and tells her that it's alright. "Me mam gives me a new one every day."

She shakes her head violently, too stubborn even if grateful for his kindness. She doesn't really trust this fellow, because she's promised herself that she's never going to get played again.

And besides, it's embarrassing to be caught like this, but he doesn't seem to mind her cooties as he bends down next to her.

"Must be tough being a girl," Chouza observes. "Having to care so much about your appearance. Like clothes. And shoes. And hair."

But like him, the rest don't know that she was just one of at least thirty children in an orphanage with that crimson hair. He and the others wouldn't know that her hair had seemed less garish when it was so common— that she wasn't sticking out all the time. They don't know that back there, there were people like her.

He waddles to a free chair, plonking himself down on it. "You should just use the hankie. No point getting all prickly about being all tomato-like."

"How would you know? Nobody makes fun of you for having red hair," she mumbles, burying her face into the hankie and blowing hard. "I don't get it. S'not fair."

"Least nobody calls you fat," he says with good-natured dolefulness . "I get worse sometimes."

He looks out of the window and waves to the same schoolmates who had just teased him and are now gesturing and calling, apparently trying to pull him into some game.

No doubt, they will complain that he's slow and clumsy later on, but he shrugs it off as he believes she should when they chortle and call her the Bloody Red Habanero for having a quick temper.

For now, he grins at her with a bit of sympathy.

"Don't mind 'em. They don't mean you no harm."

* * *

But some do.

Sometime during her second year, she has one particularly annoying classmate bring his brother in to try and fight her.

The genin is about thirteen and he's fast, dammit, so she leaps from tree to tree, hating this and hating him and hating how she can't seem to get out of the way quickly enough.

It's a good spring day with all these pretty pink petals floating like little dreams in the air, each one a boat on the current. The smell of cherry blossoms in the air is delicious and she had already agreed to go with some other girls to try and make potpourri out of the short-lived flowers.

But now she finds that she's running through those, trying to keep from falling off the branches because she's only just started getting the hang of chakra control.

A whistling sound moves past her and she ducks in time, nearly slipping and actually scared because she sees that it's a real kunai, steel and glinting. It's not one of those wooden pegs that the junior class practice with, but it's the real thing and she understands that he means to hurt her.

As usual, she manages to fix them the end, but these aren't her usual schoolmates who tease her— the kind that Chouza assured her about. These schoolmates would have hurt her and they had been planning to.

She looks up, trying to blink back her tears, then sees a familiar face staring down at her. It leaves a bitter taste in her mouth, because she sees that not even her classmate wants to step down from his tree and help her.

"Outsider!" The older one had screamed, already running off.

They can't hurt her, she thinks fiercely, when she's back in her unit and is trying to calm herself down. They can punch her and hit her as they did, but they can't hurt her. Not as long as she fights them off. You see, they can't do much. They didn't manage to hurt her.

But they did.

* * *

The first letter that she gets in Konoha makes her jump up and down and she makes a few successful clones to celebrate and form a circle of Kushinas who hold hands and cheer.

It had sat on the edge of her carpet like a pet waiting faithfully for its owner, a brown envelope and a white note enclosed in it.

She had pounced upon the letter, unable to believe her eyes and already grinning from ear to ear before she could finish reading it.

There's a whole evening to do that, she thinks, especially since her dinner only take three minutes to cook and she can just bathe on another day.

So the four Kushinas hug each other and argue about what to do, now that she gets to write back and reply. They deliberate noisily amongst themselves and decide that she'll reply by this evening and then they high-five and whoop loudly enough to scare away the birds on the window sill.

Those birds ruffle up their feathers and fly away with much fanfare, presumably complaining in bird language. She regrets that, but for that perfect moment, it seems that somebody is finally there.

Somewhere, beyond her roundish bedroom window and beyond the Academy grounds and the adjoining hostel apartments and frighteningly thick forests, there is somebody who cares enough to want to see and know about her.

Even the bumpy, self-sufficient little cactus that Biwako gave her on her last visit to this apartment seems to draw upon its water-swollen bottom and swell with Kushina's delight.

She scans through the letter again, the other three pinching her and confirming that there actually is this somebody who has "finally returned from a long trip and was wondering if you'd like to visit and have tea".

It takes her ten more minutes to tire herself out for that moment, to shoo away the other three Kushinas and to finally collapse on the bed, kicking off her slippers.

It had taken her two minutes to scan through the letter before this, but it takes her another five to re-read it properly, savouring each syllable like candied barley on the tip of her tongue.

Overall, it takes her fifteen more to remember exactly who Uzumaki Mito is.

* * *

Eventually, even the family across the street figures out that Kushina is regularly invited to visit Senju Hashirama's widow.

Kushina calls the Shodaime Hokage's wife Gramma even upon their first meeting, which really, is a bit brazen considering who the latter is.

They aren't related in any particular way beyond being part of an old, once-powerful clan. But like the names of techniques and the theoretical explanations governing those, titles have never stuck in Kushina's mind and the former Head's wife is so kindly, wizened and sweet that 'Gramma' makes immediate sense.

Despite all the things that Kushina really wants to talk about, she doesn't know how to begin. So she talks about dumbass things like her favourite colours, food, hobbies and asks all sorts of improper questions that Gramma's helpers are stunned by.

But Gramma never minds; she laughingly sends away those maids and assures everybody that Kushina is allowed to stay for as long as she likes.

Over the next year, Kushina learns that like her, Gramma loves pink and blue too. She learns that Gramma prefers savoury treats to sweet ones and used to keep a dog and a cat who never fought, but were the best of friends.

The house that Gramma lives in is more like a compound, secluded on a hill on the outskirts of Konoha and very grand.

There's a rock slope that very few other houses in the main core of Konoha retain and there are cherry trees and plum blossoms and even a beautiful sycamore and oak that shield most of it from excessive sunlight.

It seems much, much nicer than the unit that Kushina lives in, but Gramma tells her that place is better for Kushina because it's nearer the Academy.

Over her subsequent vists, Gramma watches Kushina practice her chakra control and claps when Kushina balances successfully on a tree branch.

Gramma even helps Kushina with homework sometimes, when Kushina remembers to bring it and admits that there's stuff that she doesn't really understand. And Gramma takes breaks from painting in the small garden to scribble and doodle little diagrams to help Kushina learn about chakra and other concepts, discussing anything that Kushina wants to know about.

In turn, Kushina tells Gramma all the secrets behind the pranks that she plays and gets tears of laughter from her. She helps Gramma cook and gets quite good at it, whipping up dishes in record time and conceding that instant noodles are unhealthy if they're gobbled every day.

Gramma even shows her how to skip stones in the river and Kushina whoops with amazement when she learns how to do it such that the pebble lands up all the way at the other side. But she never finds out why Gramma always looks so sad when Kushina insists that it's Gramma turn to skip stones.

Increasingly, Kushina finds that her talk of 'back home' doesn't interest her classmates anymore because the novelty has worn off. She's tired of talking about back home too, because she got played and she thinks that she's about done with that. So gradually, Uzushiogakure becomes less clear in her mind, as do some of the faces of her friends in the orphanage.

The whole thing is curious to her, but she's so busy nowadays that she can't stop to think why. She had considered talking about the whirlpools back home for the recent show-and-tell speech, or perhaps her old ambition. But in the end, she talked about a five-minute dish that ninjas could whip up while on missions and demonstrated to much of her classmates' delight.

It was received with great applause, the sounds of which Kushina re-conjures in her mind on many nights, kicking her feet with great glee under her sheets.

Really, the only thing that made it less glorious was how her classmates applauded just as loudly for Namikaze Whathisface when her speech was definitely more interesting than his chakra experiment.

* * *

Before she knows it, months have passed and a nippy, autumn evening comes when Gramma invites her to stay over.

You see, she's so excited that she can hardly stop bouncing up and down even on the veranda, and Kushina keeps them both up by asking Gramma more questions than usual.

She finds out that more than a few decades ago, Gramma's real name was Mitsuko before she became a political ambassador to the Senju clan.

Apparently, the then-Senju leader and future Konoha founder had misheard her name and addressed her that for a long time before anybody cared or dared to correct him. By then, the name Mito had stuck. Gramma herself had never protested.

"Why not?" Kushina demands, ignoring the futon that the maids have laid down and expected them to use by now. "Everybody's name matters. It's like their identity. Their destiny, too."

Gramma only smiles, gets her more snacks and pours her more tea.

* * *

Gramma isn't just a friend that Kushina runs to when she's free from all the training and increasingly difficult missions— she's much more to Kushina.

Over Kushina's second year in Konoha, Gramma shares all the stories that she remembers about Uzushiogakure. She tells Kushina of the old Uzumaki Clan legends and sings in a beautiful, queer whisper of folk songs about familiar whirlpools and scuttling, translucent little crabs that Kushina sometimes dreams of.

One day, Gramma even takes a brush and covers her bedroom's walls with a hundred tiny depictions of seals in a burst of inspiration, all because Kushina asks to know about the Uzushiogakure heritage.

"That's everything I remember," Gramma says, breathlessly, sleeves a little smudged from dancing across the room with a strength that surprised them both. And in a rare show of self-indulgence and something that Kushina recognizes as pride, she smiles. "I'd never have forgotten any seal from there though."

And that's the moment when Kushina decides that she'll do her best to learn all these seals and remember all that she can too. The country of the whirlpools is a much poorer, less famous place than when Gramma was sent away from it like Kushina, but it is part of Gramma and all of Kushina's past and dreams. It deserves to be remembered.

So she copies out the seals laboriously every week when she visits Gramma, embellishing the bare fishbones of the stories behind some seals with the flesh of her imagination and creating others for the seals that Gramma knows no stories for.

Some nights, Kushina thinks that Uzushiogakure has grown distant because of all the exhausting new tasks for her.

On other nights, she lies in bed and visualizes a glittering canvas of a time gone by when the Uzumaki Clan members bravely scattered themselves across different countries as envoys and when every member was proud of their instantly recognizable red hair.

* * *

Some times, she remembers specific things about Uzushiogakure.

There are scary stories that she'd heard from people back home. Once, she'd seen those fascinating murals in the caves near the outskirts. Some children had shared old tribe songs about a beast— those had strange rhymes and tunes that scared everyone into tucking themselves into bed back at the orphanage.

But those tales and rhymes about a fox and rivers dyed as red as her hair were just made up to scare children. She's confident that she's old enough not to be bamboozled by anyone anymore.

Besides, Gramma is too good at cooking and making delicious treats for such horrible stories to exist about her and anyway, everybody probably likes Gramma as much as Kushina does.

Sometimes, she thinks that she was really played for believing in the Kyuubi. It's just an old story.

Nobody talks about that much in Konoha— not Gramma either. In fact, nobody in the village really talks about Gramma at all.

You see, it's strange, because loads of people talk about Shodaime Hokage even now. But they keep silent about Gramma, who is certainly still alive and a legend back home in Uzushiogakure.

Maybe the Konoha villagers can't remember; maybe they only see Gramma as an old dame with sunken cheeks and wrinkly hands and eyes that can't seem to open fully.

For a long time, Kushina also can't see how Gramma can be the woman in the painting. Large and grand despite fading over the years, it hangs in a mostly empty room, the locked boxes and chests stacked on one end and some old scrolls packed into a cupboard on the other.

When she stares up at it, she sees that the woman in the portrait has fair skin and lovely hands that peep from her primrose-yellow sleeves, a smile spreading luscious and deep against her eyes and lips. The woman's gaze is a bit shy, secretive even, but it's anchored on the beaming, laughing man beside her.

Mostly, Kushina wonders how this shriveled, dumpy old woman was the same clear-eyed, elegant lady in the painting.

That's why she gasps and sputters when she comes across this particular painting and the maids tell her that it depicts Gramma and the Shodaime Hokage.

"Did you have to pay the painter lots?" Kushina blurts out, wide-eyed and looking up at the woman who was apparently the subject of the painting.

Gramma's eyebrows shoot up and she bursts out in laughter, letting go of Kushina's hand for that moment. She doesn't reply, but she laughs so much that she gets a bit breathless and stoops over and Kushina gets worried, because Gramma's posture is usually impeccable. She is much older than Kushina often remembers and it occurs to Kushina now that Gramma is from a time when Konoha hadn't quite existed and the cameras and photographs weren't very good.

"Not that the painters were all that accurate either," she mutters.

And Gramma chuckles and says, "Don't you get all sassy now."

* * *

When she finally has a chance during a school outing, Kushina goes looking for the painting that she recalls one of her classmates referring to in the Konoha Historical Halls.

As she wanders away from her classmates who are all oohing and aahing over diagrams and thickly-cased prototypes of custom-edged kunai that the Nidaime designed, she becomes oblivious to the combined scrutiny of her teacher and the sufficiently-experienced curator's eyes boring at her back.

Instead of admiring the Nidaime's innovations, she trundles past all the scrolls and miscellaneous records and screeches to a halt only at a particular glass casing.

She sees her eyes, huge stars set in her reflection, breath misting and cooling against the glass with her palms pressing patterns against it.

She has to squint to read the caption, but she eventually makes out from all the complicated, ancient writing that this portrait and the accompanying couplet were commissioned for the engagement of the Shodaime and Uzushiogakure's key envoy.

She nearly explodes with pride.

She begins shouting all that she can read to her classmates and running around in excitement, getting the curator and instructor hot on her heels while threatening to throw her out of the Historical Halls. Eventually, she calms down just a tiny bit and pushes to the front of the new crowd at the glass case.

There, she examines the painting a little bit more closely. She gets so enthralled by it that she doesn't even realize or get upset that her classmates don't think the painting's all that cracked up and have moved off.

To Kushina, the man in the scroll-painting looks powerful and strong and yet there is humility and gentleness in his eyes, an awkwardness in the arms that hang by his side.

She looks at him and sees that the first Hokage's hair flows long and untamed even if his betrothed's mane is primly tucked and pinned in a tight, even strictly measured symmetry.

Despite sharing the same flashing red hair and clear, almost golden eyes with the woman in Gramma's other painting, this woman in the Konoha Historical Hall's painting doesn't seem to be smiling. She seems a bit stiff and seems vastly different from the woman in the painting in Gramma's house.

Cocking her head and trying to see a bit better, Kushina decides that the Shodaime and Gramma must have been a bit uncomfortable back then. That, or the artist hadn't been paid enough.

She stares at this painting again and suddenly, all she can think about is the forlornness in Gramma's face when they'd skipped stones at the river.

* * *

Sometimes, she likes to pretend that Uzumaki Mito is a great-great-grand-aunt-once-removed or something like that.

"I mean, it's possible, right?" She lapses into her verbal tic all over again, afraid that Gramma will refuse to entertain such a maudlin idea.

"It could be," Gramma smiles. "Doesn't matter anyway."

"But it does!" Kushina insists.

She was warned by Biwako not to talk about visiting Gramma to anyone and Kushina figures that her classmates would get jealous. Still, she and Gramma are good friends and because Kushina's kept her mouth shut about everything so far, there's no harm asking when they're alone now.

"I want to have a family— I want you to be my family. Would you be my family?"

"I already am," Gramma says, those crinkly, bright eyes shining. "Each person in Konoha is part of your family. And you are family to me too. You're not alone now."

But Kushina is.

She knows it in all her bones, even while she sits in Gramma's kitchen and swings her legs from the chair. For people like her, that's just the way it is. She has always known the sting and particular saltiness of unwanted tears running from her cheeks and nose and she has understood the bitterness of abandonment even when she gobbles all the good food that Gramma lays in front of her, afraid that it will suddenly be taken away.

"Don't you ever get lonely, Gramma?" She asks this between packed mouthfuls of noodles and a creamy broth that must have simmered for hours.

"Sometimes, I do." Gramma says.

Her smile dims and her eyes grow soft and crumpled like a discarded handkerchief in the kitchen corner.

* * *

Even though Gramma has possibly already left for the Lightning country, Kushina's had a rough week and doesn't want to stay put in the apartment near the Academy. It galls her to admit as much, but she really needs someone to talk to right now.

When she visits Gramma's house, she climbs in from the south hall's window, knowing that she's doing something wrong because she hasn't actually been invited. But still, she hopes that Gramma is around and will listen to Kushina and provide a bit of advice— Gramma always seems to know what to do.

The air is humid and she swallows, trying to remind herself to drink more water. She probably should— she's already feeling a bit ill and there's been a flu bug going around. At this rate, she'll be too weak to put up any fight on her missions and her teammates will wonder what's wrong with her.

It's eerily quiet and she calls out in the way that Gramma told her to—to treat this place like her own home. Not that she does so completely, because for people like her, they know better than that.

Today, nobody answers and there are no attendants who are rushing out to greet her and keep her from accidentally knocking into some precious vase or another.

She feels a strange sense of unease and wanders to what was formerly the servants' kitchen, staring up at the window where the sun is beginning to climb down in the sky. Then there is a strange shadow cast over her face like an eclipse and she sees two faces pressing nearer.

Startled, she tries to scream but you see, it's a bit too late for that.

* * *

There was a girl, walking on with her feet bleeding and her sandals broken because she was forced to.

She had fought and fought, but sometimes, you just can't win.

You see, you're just you and no matter what you do, there are people out there who know how to hurt you.

They know how to make you remember all that you think you've healed from. They shouldn't have been able to hurt her, but they could.

They did.

At some point, she believed that she had no other choice, because her hands were still tied behind her back even when nobody was there to yank on the string and use her like a puppet. She will be hidden, as they tell her.

She will be hidden and she's that little girl again, playing hide-and-seek, squatting in a stump, waiting and waiting.

And this time, there's nothing to wait for.

She has no weapons, no abilities to free herself, no hope that there will be a new day and a new chance.

Yet, it's perfect irony in a way, because all that she has is all of herself and all of that hateful red hair.

There won't be anyone who will come get her, they've told her. She's too far gone and at any rate, nobody helps the outsider.

That's just the way it is, for people like her.

* * *

Then there is a figure of a boy, emerging in the moonlight, struggling a little from a fight that he wouldn't have won, but for the element of surprise.

It's a stooped figure, small and panting from the exertion of all his efforts, and she squints but everything's getting darker.

It's springing towards her even before she can fully make out who it is.

She thinks that he must be shrinking, because he's getting smaller and smaller.

But then he's suddenly taller than her and she realises that he has bent only to keep her propped up, supporting her like nobody ever has.

She doesn't know why he's saying what he does and why he brings them to the tallest tree around. The moon hangs bright when they're up here and the shadows are only for those trapped in the forests below and up here, she finds that she can breathe.

He should just let her go or bring them back to the village that she was exiled to, where she creeps past the stern faces carved of rock, hating them, hating how she's trapped, hating the way she can't free herself.

Then there's this breeze that blows and by now, she's capable of standing on her own, but he's still not letting go.

He looks down at her, which people like her normally can't tolerate.

But you see, he's looking down at her only because he's helping her up.

* * *

These days, Kushina's getting good at her work.

She still has trouble taking written tests, but she's a whole lot more confident about herself and doesn't need to argue to feel heard much anymore. Of course, she still has no problems beating the boys into a pulp and the girls always welcome her in case they need to punish the boys.

She was always quite energetic as she admits in her own words, and a smiling Gramma agrees thoroughly.

The little cactus that Biwako gave her has been joined by another potted plant that Kushina bought on a whim, a small, fuzzy looking fellow with yellow-tinged leaves that she really, really likes. She puts it out at the kitchen table and makes sure to take care of it.

On nights with full moons, she watches it gleam. Its spiky little leaves remind her of the pine tree and the view of Konoha- her home, he'd said. The colour of the leaves in the moonlight look like his hair from when he held her and said that he didn't think of her as an outsider;that he had chased after them because he didn't want to lose her.

She has to remind herself not to hold any deeper meaning to those words, but she'll admit that Namikaze Minato's much more interesting than she first gave him credit for. With their newly-forged friendship, she's gained at least a dozen more friends, that much she'll confess.

One thing hasn't changed though.

She can get really, really mad when people make fun of her hair, but she grows it out anyway. It may not look great no matter which way she turns in the mirror and whatever light she puts it under, but she's an Uzumaki, dammit, she's not going to apologise for her red hair.

In fact, she's decided to love it.

Anyway, there's always a half-an-hour break and the yard to sort things out.

The kids who still persist in making fun of her don't seem to mind getting thrashed and all— they seem to love getting her worked up and they always go for a meal and share their food later on.

There are no more ill feelings, and as much as she's mortified by the teasing, she likes all of them and she prays everyday (to whoever who's listening) that they like her back.

* * *

It is a rainy, extremely gloomy day when they can't go skipping stones and are stuck in the house.

As usual, Kushina is chattering on and on. Today's topics are mostly rants about the Hyuuga twins' stuck-up noses and Nara Shikaku doing everybody a favour by outwitting the elder twin in a game of shogi.

"Did you know, Gramma?" Kushina crows, "The Nara Clan members apparently keep their hair tied up to avoid the Nara Clan's hair-munching deer! How cool is that? I don't see why so many girls are so crazy about the Hyuuga twins— imagine getting to visit the Nara Clan and those amazing deer!"

She fails to mention how she'd blushed so embarrassingly when she bumped into Namikaze Minato who was emerging from the library on the way here.

He hasn't been around much these days because he was off training with Jiraiya-sensei and the sage toads, but she had been the first to know about that and the first he had wanted to meet, as he'd said. She'd gone all red, but he looked directly at her and smiled so brightly that she wanted to run and hide.

But it's all too mortifying, so Kushina sticks to yammering on about something else.

And Gramma seems to be nodding and listening as usual. But then they happen to go into that mostly empty room with the old painting hanging there and that's when something strange enters Gramma's eyes.

"Do you know why you were brought to Konoha?" Gramma asks suddenly.

"No." Kushina says, so taken aback from the forcefulness of Gramma's words that she doesn't even remember what she was saying previously.

Gramma's eyes seem to flit to the portrait of the deceased man and she sinks into a chair, at a table that has nothing on it. It's strange, now that Kushina thinks about it, because she's heard the maids asking Gramma about her granddaughter. But Kushina's yet to see the woman that the maids call Tsunade and she's not even sure where Gramma's granddaughter even is.

Kushina finds herself faltering, feeling guilty and awfully bad for being so caught up with all her new friends and not spending so much time here these days. "Gramma, do you get lonely here?"

"Sometimes." Gramma's answer hasn't changed, even if Kushina asked her that about a year ago.

Kushina presses on. "But not all the time?"

"You're here, as so many others are." Gramma looks resolute as she gets up.

She reaches out to stroke Kushina's head, then takes a lock of that red, red hair into her palm, tugging it very gently. "There are always new days and new chances for people."

"For people like me?" Kushina is a tad doubtful. Just the other day, her teacher had threatened to throw her out of class.

"For people like you. And me."

* * *

Because Kushina has grown up quite a bit since leaving the orphanage and reckons that she's been played enough for a lifetime, she rolls her eyes when anyone makes scary faces and mentions the Kyuubi these days. To her mind now, the older children and the adults who told stories of the creature back home were just big, fat liars.

It has been five years since she left the Whirlpool country, three years since she began to think of it as her past rather than "back home", and nearly a hundred missions of varying difficulty levels since she graduated from the Academy.

There are days when Kushina stacks up bowl after bowl of scrumptious ramen and leaves no drop of broth unfinished, much to her friends' amazement and occasional disgust. But she can afford to celebrate all the small triumphs of her life— during these years, she's passed about a dozen written tests even if she's failed about twenty others. Anyway, there's always a reason to celebrate when there are missions that take her to new places.

She trains hard with her teammates, goes swimming on some days off and tries dating.

Because nobody's asked her out per se—or at least, that somebody isn't around half the time— she agrees to go on a blind date. It turns out to be Kushina's first and last hangout with Mikoto's extremely dishy but stiff, humorless older cousin.

It's a pity, but that's just the way it is.

Along with Gramma's homemade birthday cakes, there was the morning when she nearly ran out screaming blue murder at bloodstains that she found on her undies and the embarrassing crops of zits and a newly-tender chest. Of course, the female instructors did eventually hold a class to issue advice and standard white bindings, but by then, Biwako and Gramma had had to calm her down and assure her that she wasn't dying of some internal injury or rare poison in her system.

Then another year passes and a boy asks her out. Because that particular somebody doesn't seem all that interested to actually ask, she agrees to hang out with the boy who bothers asking. This one seems funny enough, but she ends up nearly pummeling him into oblivion when he makes this offensive joke about the poor, deprived Uzushiogakure behind her back.

She doesn't really take it to heart after she's taught him a lesson. Anyway, she can't deny that any news of Uzushiogakure tends to be sorry, what with Konoha-nin being sent in with rations and providing help when the Whirlpool country's remaining nin can't fend off invasions for themselves.

Beyond that, many people have already left the Whirlpool country and resettled elsewhere over the last few years. Kushina is one of many and there were countless numbers before her, even if it wasn't her choice back then. Even when she had asked the Hokage and his wife for permission last year, they said that it was too late for Kushina to try to return, even with all that she'd learnt from Konoha.

You see, the Hokage explained gently, over the years and between wars before and during the time that Kushina was born, the Whirlpool country had already lost many of its best people— it just couldn't keep up with times, no matter how much the remaining people wanted it to.

"Besides," Biwako reminds her, "Konoha is your home now."

Thinking about her old country makes her sad at times, but overall, Kushina still feels that it was part of destiny's grand blueprint to give her a new home and a new chance.

Here in this country, children don't starve. People are friendly once you get to know them and even the people from the noble, hoity-toity clans are actually okay. This is a place that she becomes so familiar with that the terrain of the forests and the lakes running through the south and east might as well have been carved on her palms.

The years brush by like lazy, low-flying moths in the tall blue grass, days floating and stretching into an immeasurable sky, inviting her to open herself once more. Undoubtedly, there are a few untimely deaths of people that Kushina had grown to know and care for, with plenty of injuries and bruises in between. Yet, that is the way of the shinobi, who protect the place they call home.

She has become strong enough to complete missions in other lands and to attend funerals with her teammates even as fights and scuffles regularly erupt like old rashes between the Konoha-nin and other countries. Just beyond the forests surrounding the Leaf village, there have always been lands that control their own resources with people who threaten to encroach other territories wrongfully.

Beyond time-honoured tradition and the wars that Gramma refuses to talk about in detail when Kushina asks, everybody knows that Konoha-nin are not just messengers or odd-job labourers— such people would not require training to use weapons efficiently and to kill without leaving too much of a trace.

But for people like her, that's just the way it is.

Every day, Kushina hopes that the wars of the past are truly over.

* * *

When Mito looks at Kushina, she understands why the girl can be so much more carefree than Mito could never be.

There have been two more Hokages since the Shodaime Hokage with fewer and fewer battles if one cares to track the trends over the last three decades. The Valley of the End is shrouded in an eternal mist, a thousand years away from being visibly eroded by the waterfalls and rivers that pound and meander through it, the faces of her late husband and his life-long regret no more expressive than the sum of their rock parts.

The bright colours of the new world have almost bled out the silent, eeriness of the old days when Mito tried to sleep in tents disguised by Hashirama's trees, hands clutching a dagger in case she was caught in genjutsu and had to wake herself up at any cost.

The singeing remnants of cicada shells that she'd bent and picked up during those days seem to be imagined and Madara's voice is almost forgotten even to her cautious, disciplined mind—only the memory of his empathy and his hands that had once touched her face in wonder are sustained like the reverberating echoes of the war-horn.

The deafening bustle of a village that her husband built and chose to exist for has since crowded out the dreams of the days when she'd watched him standing on cliff edges.

He had always looked like he was bleeding into the horizon then, his back so broad and feet so rooted when he stretched his hands out into vermillion sunsets, deciding where Konohagakure would be.

Their children, lively and bright for those short years, are best forgotten. The village was his true heir— she would prefer to look to that as well, for fear of the old madness coiling and choking the life out of her. It is so much easier to forget the injuries caused and the injuries sustained, now that the place has ceased to be imagined and has come to be.

Between a past mottled with hatred and the strangling grip of Clans pitting mere children against each other, it is much easier to talk of happier things, to relegate the old conflicts and Tailed Beasts to campfires or puppet shows by roadsides and to festivals.

But with its origins came sacrifice, as its continuation similarly demands. There are things that have to be sacrificed and people who must be willing to pave the way for others, even if the others are scarcely aware or appreciate it.

To that end, there are very few people who understand that for people like Mito and the younger Uzumaki, becoming the vessel for a monster was never really a choice.

* * *

The thing about being fourteen going on fifteen is that you're not supposed to get played like this.

Granted, she should have been better than this. She should have smelt a rat or two when she made chakra strands whip out of her body during some game and she had been sent away from Uzushiogakure shortly thereafter. She should have remembered the mask-wearing nin who had escorted her and later been called 'Anbu' by her Academy instructor. Of all things, she should have noticed that her chakra patterns took on the visible shape of chains when nobody else's ever did.

But since Kushina's apparently too dumb to have figured it out on her own even after being kidnapped by Kumo-nin and having security around her apartment unit tripled, Biwako eventually has Gramma inform her of the Hokage's plans much later after the incident.

The ceremony and process will be held in three days time to prevent another altercation from happening. As Biwako puts it, the Elders and the Council felt that it was supposed to have been done sooner, but they put it off because they felt that they could. After Kumogakure's conduct however, the people in charge have concluded that she had been obviously sticking out as an Uzumaki and attracting the attention that they did not want.

But this is not supposed to be happening now, Kushina thinks.

She had only just started to feel good enough to doodle hearts on the corners of her notebook. There is the lucidity and calmness of his demeanour that she was planning to imitate when announcing to Gramma that she was going to chase after him this time, rather than wait for him to chase after her again. She has only just begun to really admit how much she likes him, the way he'd looked down at her and told her how he'd noticed her hair— hair that he called beautiful.

She had visited Gramma today, intending to finally tell her about that boy. He has hair like young corn, the type nestled within the fibrous protective leaves, she'd been planning to explain. He has a real pretty face, she'd had planned to say. He's got a girlish body, features like a puppy's—or a kid's. She had been going to ask if Gramma thought he'd had his share of girls, seeing as how the instructors had always praised him back in the Academy. She had been going to tell Gramma that others had always liked him, if more than and even before she began to.

Just because Gramma would definitely not laugh at her, she had been prepared to admit that she asked him out, like all of them. You see, she had come to the rather uncomfortable conclusion that she had developed a major crush on him after some time. It was hard not to, since she had lost sleep for a week after he saved her and made that idiotic comment about her hair. He'd spoken as casually as anybody would have talked about the weather, but she played it in her mind for weeks, finding herself distracted all the time.

Her stammering, red-faced anger and frustration towards her own inaptitude hadn't seemed that bad in retrospect—he'd agreed to go out with her, hadn't he?

"Okay," he'd said mildly, like she hadn't actually charged up to him in front of their teams and demanded that he be present in front of the usual ramen place at eight. "I haven't had ramen in a while. It'll be nice."

The guys had whooped, the girls gaped, and she turned an even darker shade of scarlet, wondering what had possessed her to march right up to him that way. Anyway, he had showed up, as he had for all the subsequent outings and even to a recent festival.

She had been waiting for visit Gramma for so long. She had been biting back her excitement, trying to speak calmly and clearly. All this time, Kushina had been counting on Gramma to congratulate her for being so candid and straightforward about the whole thing.

But now she takes one unsteady step towards Gramma, not knowing if this is really the same friend or a stranger sitting on Gramma's bed.

It wasn't supposed to be like this, she bursts out, cutting into Gramma's rigid, overly-rehearsed explanation about the Kyuubi's power and the seal on her belly. Kushina's not suppose to know anything about something that shouldn't exist after all this time, she's not supposed to be sitting there, watching as Gramma talks about what Kushina was brought here for. It wasn't supposed to happen like this.

I was supposed to tell you about a boy that I like, she thinks, and you were supposed to laugh and tell me to stop hanging out with him so much. I was going to tease and joke and ask if you were jealous that I was spending more time with him than with you.

You were the one who talked about new days and new chances and my new family in Konoha. I was going to ask you if you reckoned he was a player. You were supposed to teach me how to make those bento sets.

You were supposed to give me advice on how to ask him out more.

You were supposed to warn me that I should be careful not to get played.

Uzushiogakure—Konohagakure wasn't supposed to play me.

You weren't supposed to play me.

There's nothing that Kushina can do.

Short of wishing that the Kumo-nin had successfully brought her back to their village and killed her out of mercy or pure mishandling, there's no other way except for Kushina to accept the true reason that she was brought to Konoha all those years ago.

Actually, there is something that Kushina can do and she does it.

She throws herself down onto Gramma's feet, begging and crying harder than she has in a long, long time. She begs and promises to be a better girl; to do so well that she's definitely, definitely going to become a Jounin soon, to complete more missions, to stop playing pranks, to comb her hair more regularly. The list goes on, as do her uncontrollable sobs.

She doesn't think of threatening to kill herself in time— the thought just doesn't occur to someone like her.

But her tears are very real and she is sobbing, terrified at being betrayed once more, trembling from the thought of being as shunned as she was was a little girl, crossing her fingers so tightly that they tingled white while lining up with the other children in the orphanage.

That little girl once played hide-and-seek and waited hours in a hollow tree stump, but the others had finished the game and forgotten because it was so easy to when you weren't the one waiting. There was a little girl, sitting in some hallway and later the playground and an empty apartment unit, waiting for someone who never came to get her in the end.

She doesn't want to go back there all over again.

Gramma takes her hand and touches her cheek and lets her cry her snot all over into Gramma's lap. She strokes Kushina's head, saying nothing while Kushina begs and begs.

"It's not fair," Kushina weeps. She's shaking and she hates being seen like this, but it's too late to hold back now. "Why me? I was trying so hard. Why do I have to be the one?"

It takes her a little more than half an hour to exhaust herself quite thoroughly. By then, she has buried her face in Gramma's lap, eyes so swollen that she can barely see the glinting tears in Gramma's and the tiny tremor that passes through the older woman.

"Like you, I was brought here for the same purpose." Gramma murmurs. "I can imagine your shock when you learned of this— how sad you must feel."

Kushina still can't speak, but Gramma's voice does not break at all.

"Indeed, we were brought here to be vessels for the Kyuubi," Gramma says steadily. She does not take away the hand, heavy but comforting on Kushina's shoulder. "But even before the Kyuubi's power can be used, you must fill yourself with love."

Kushina doesn't know what to say anymore. She tries to raise her head, but she can't and she hiccups once, feeling Gramma begin tracing those comforting, circular patterns on her head. She closes her eyes, almost resigning herself completely.

Then Gramma sighs, long and with an aching that seems to spread from her lungs into her feet and face. The age has entered her bones this time and it is obvious to anyone who has a beating heart. She begins to speak in earnest, no longer soft and gentle. She speaks in a voice so determined and compelling that Kushina must listen.

She speaks of a past that Kushina could only have imagined and pieced together from the little fragments that remained in the Historical halls; Gramma explains all that she understands about the Kyuubi and what it is and why it had to be sealed. For once, Gramma speaks of the wars in any detail at all and why she decided that it was better for the Kyuubi to be within her than to ravage everything that a man whom she loved was going to die for to protect it.

Finally, she tells Kushina about what every Uzumaki used to be capable of and what they are still competent to do.

And Kushina listens.

In just two hours, Kushina has been told what to expect, how to communicate with the Kyuubi if she should need to and what to do to look after herself. Then Gramma makes Kushina repeat everything just so everything is clear.

The extraction won't take more than ten minutes, as Gramma will undo the seal herself. Still, directing it into Kushina will take slightly over half an hour, if all things go well.

"I'll be there throughout it," Gramma tells her, eyes damp but unblinking. "I'll do it myself. I promise. When you wake up, you'll find me there. Everything will be fine— you just need to stay the way you are and to be strong for yourself and for the village. You hear me? I won't let anyone harm you."

"Because I'll be the Kyuubi's jinchuriki by then?" Kushina sniffles, rubbing her eyes and successfully irritating them more than they already are.

"No," Gramma says, smiling and holding her arms open for Kushina to scoot into them."Because you're you."

They spend the rest of the evening like that, Gramma comforting Kushina and repeating that Kushina will be alright. And for the next two days, the two spend almost every minute in each others' company. They try cooking and eating almost like they used to, smiling and sleeping side by side, until it is time.

Then Gramma packs a fresh set of robes for Kushina, holds her hand and lets them both be escorted away by the Hokage, his wife, two Council members, five skilled medics and forty-eight Anbu.

* * *

The last that Kushina remembers of the ceremony is that she is screaming soundlessly and her eyes are filled with a translucent blood that spills orange fire and pink-black brimstone into her core and gall.

There is a feeling that she is being picked apart by needles stabbing into every nerve and someone— something— is laughing, a sound that she remembers from the hyenas in the tall grass on one mission to the Water Country.

And she would have begged, pride abandoned, for her to just die, but then there are circular motions like those that Gramma traced on her back whistling over her skin and providing a respite before she is truly ripped apart. She screams in pure agony, voice breaking even before the note is truly in the air, panting, trying to break free even when she told herself that she would be strong and accept her name and destiny.

Then it is over and there is Gramma, hair completely loose, spilling all over her shoulders like streams of dusty rice from a tattered gunnysack. There is the smell of ash and sweat and what is probably Kushina's pee, but there is Gramma, holding her, kissing her forehead and smiling and saying, "You'll be alright. You'll be alright. You'll be alright. You'll be—"

Two days later, Kushina awakes in the Hokage Tower's guest room, Biwako replacing the wet cloths over Kushina's feverish forehead and some medics and Anbu standing by in the corner.

One medic immediately rushes over to help her sit up and Kushina almost laughs, because it isn't even painful now and it's like she's had the deepest sleep that she could have ever had in a very long time. She grins, remembering what Gramma had warned her it would feel like, even though the inside of her mouth feels like sand-dust. Then she balls her fists and looks around at all the faces and masks, searching for someone and preparing to make a wise-crack as she'd promised.

"Where's Gramma?" Kushina demands.

Biwako just shakes her head.

* * *

The thought of being the Kyuubi's container is terrifying, but it is not so frightening to the villagers as much as to the girl who has nobody to admit her fear to.

She would have liked to lop off her hair and to her credit, she tries her darndest to. If she had felt vastly different despite the weeks of her recuperation, the fact that her hair grew back from the edge of her chin to the back of her knees within two days is ample confirmation of the foreign presence in her.

The thought of that foreignness being carried in every step, breath and heartbeat of hers makes her clam up more often than not. The family across the road hurries their children indoors these days, answering her forced, cheery inquiries about their day with a new politeness and nervous caution lurking in their smiles.

Her sensei and teammates seem mostly alright, despite being privy to how quickly her injuries and bruises now heal within minutes. Although they tiptoe around her and seem a bit cautious, Gramma's reminders make her grit her teeth and act like all is normal in the hopes that everybody will go back to being casual and rambunctious around her. She tries to remind herself that they are adjusting, just like her.

She's given a whole two months of leave even if she's technically healthier than she ever was. Then again, she doesn't have the energy or will to protest for once, chest still aching from the loss of Gramma and the sight of the tiny, crumpled ashes swirling and dissolving into a river that they'd once skipped stones in.

Always kind-hearted, one of her best friends, Mikoto, visits her in her apartment. Mikoto has apparently missed her, bringing some delicious, tangy tomato soup and all kinds of goodies. With Ten Ru and some others, they play cards and things seem almost normal at some points when their voices are raised and they are teasing and arguing about who's supposed to win.

But then they leave when Kushina asks to rest eventually. On other days, some of her other good friends visit and inquire about her health with an infuriatingly careful inflection in their voices. She tolerates that because she thinks it's not their fault for not knowing all that she does— she smiles and tries to be merry and keeps the anguish and despair locked away for the nights when the Kyuubi laughs and grinds his teeth against the walls of the seal.

When she does dare to place her hand over her belly and communicate with the beast like how Gramma told her the seal allowed her to, she finds a presence so dark and rank that it revolts her, making her rush to the bathroom to throw up.

With subsequent attempts to communicate, she tries to assert her identity. The beast, not quite dormant and not quite in control, glares at her with unconcealed hatred. With the next few attempts, she tries to be braver. She tries to negotiate. It howls its laughter, eyes wide with appreciation at how naïve she is. It bares its teeth on other nights, cavorting into her dreams with a horrifying grace and power that ripples into her own muscles as she sits up in bed, perspiring and believing that the seal has broken.

She doesn't ever beg it for mercy, however. Only Gramma has seen her beg, and Gramma is dead now. Begging was a thing of the past, because an Uzumaki will not stoop to that.

There comes a time when she is completely resigned to holding it in her and tells herself and the beast as much.

"We've never had much luck, have we?"

It grins its malevolence at her, but she steels herself and continues. "You keep the world at bay, but I keep you at bay."

As others now keep me at bay, she thinks.

"Stay deep within me."

There are some days when Kushina looks into the mirror and hates her reflection. There are days when she sees a strange new beauty in her very white teeth and the eyes that have become slate-grey, diluted and clearer than what she can remember as their original bluish-tone. But the girl in the mirror is an Uzumaki through and through and Kushina promises that she owes it to herself and Gramma to keep her act together.

There is just one person that she instinctively avoids even now, despite them getting along pretty nicely just before, well, all of this. You see, there isn't really any hope now, for people like her.

Sometimes, she waves back to him to look polite in front of the others but keeps the door locked when it's him knocking and trying to press the spoiled doorbell. For all her friends and his, and for all the progress that she is making with the others as they return to their good-natured bantering and camaraderie, she knows that what she had once hoped for is impossible with the boy whom she liked. Had liked.

Incredibly enough, she eventually survives another year, becomes sixteen and celebrates by breaking into Gramma's deserted, heavily-locked house.

For that whole day, she sits by the banks and skips stones in the river before eating half a slice of cake and feeding the fishes with the rest of it.

* * *

There comes a time when she is waylaid by him and he asks if she can help him with some research on seals.

Holding up her hands and sputtering, she tries to decline, but then he's been clever enough to ask in front of almost everyone else who matters. Already, she feels like she has to agree because she'd look like a prick for refusing to help out.

"Uh," she tries to say, resorting to poking fun at herself and resenting him for it. "I'm no good, don't ask me. I only barely passed the Chuunin exams, remember?"

"But you're really good at reading and using those special seals," Ten Ru points out, "Nobody else can use them so well here. I guess those are particularly compatible with your chakra and your chakra chains?"

A glare is instantly leveled Ten Ru's way and it makes the girl pipe down straightaway.

"Eh, why don't you ask your teacher?" Inazuka Tsume asks, conveniently poking her nose into this.

Wagging his tail, Kuromaru barks his recommendation as well and Kushina immediately feels a swell of affection for the mutt and the Inazuka trainer.

"He's a perverted old man," Kuromaru tells them gruffly, since it's hard for the nin-dog to speak in any other kind of tone except a growl or bark. "But I heard from my Pop that he's not too shabby with these academic things."

"How would your dad know?" Akimichi Chouza says interestedly to the nin-dog.

"Pop used to hang out with the Sage's Toads when they were summoned. Back in the day, they used to go swimming," Kuromaru informs, displaying all the nonchalance that a dog could possibly own.

Nobody questions that recommendation, even if there are enough first-hand accounts from the folks in the Onsen town about the legendary Jiraiya's crazy antics. Still, as Kuromaru says, Jiraiya is certainly a good person and quite a character while proving to be a first-rate teacher— there has long been talk that Jiraiya's students are some of the best shinobi that this village has ever produced.

It makes complete sense for Minato to go find his teacher, she says, I'll bet eight bowls of ramen that he knows more about seals than I do.

"But our sensei's away," Hiruko points out and they're back to square one.

"Or how about Aburame Shikuro, he reads so widely that he must have read something about those seals before." Tsume says. "That'll help you out a bit, Minato."

They look around.

"Actually, where is he?"

They begin trying to spot him but they've failed to notice that he couldn't possibly around, having been sent for a mission.

"Or how about Shikaku?" Yamanaka Inoichi suggests. "I'll bet he knows."

Immediately, there is a murmur of acquiescence and a vigorous bout of nodding from Mikoto, who's taken one look at her best friend's face and obviously knows what not to do.

Not having uttered a word since he sat there, watching all of them, Nara Shikaku yawns and immediately delegates the work.

"You do it, Kushina." He drawls this out, settling himself against a log and propping his feet up on a low-hanging branch. "I need to trim the deer's antlers this week."

Then he sighs and mumbles about everything being a drag.

Frustrated at getting pushed into this, Kushina wants to echo him.

She mostly gets out of the way by pulling out some reference books and dropping a pre-scribbled chart of rudimentary seals that he could probably start off with. She did feel a flush of pride at knowing exactly what she was doing with all these seals, but it's a pity that she can't bring herself to hand them to him and boast.

Despite him already having a table booked and waiting patiently in a corner, she passes them over without looking at him in the eye, then mumbles something about those being self-explanatory.

* * *

A week later, he gives up pressing her broken door-bell. But then he finds her in front of all their mates.

Scratching his head apologetically, he tells her that he didn't understand very much.

"Those seals are pretty difficult, actually," his teammate, Ten Long says seriously. His lips twitch, however, and Kushina fights the urge to drag him all over the floor by his neatly-tied, double-bound hair knot. "I mean, they're so intricate and obviously Minato's struggling to really understand them."

One of the Hyuuga twins— she can never be sure exactly which is which— uncrosses his arms, tilting his chin coolly to survey the chart that Kushina had provided. "Fascinating indeed."

"It is interesting," the other twin notes in an equally regal tone, and Kushina decodes it as the Hyuuga admitting that it is completely beyond him.

"Please tell me when you're free so that I can understand them properly," Minato says, smiling that infuriatingly humble smile and thus making it impossible for her to decline when he's asked so politely in the spirit of learning.

She turns red in the face, trying not to scream and tell him off for not actually being the genius that everybody keeps saying that he is.

* * *

He's asking whether he can kiss her.

It's her bad, really. The session wherein she had explained the seals to him carried on into another, since he seemed to be genuinely curious about learning those and trying to work out the logic behind each intricate design.

From her previous observations, she knows that he can get fixated and obsessed over reading books, or playing chess, or practicing a technique. She's seen him sitting at the river for hours before, fishing when there are nothing but rocks in a river, a whole gang of toads and his pervy old teacher laughing with him about something or another.

It has always puzzled her, because for all his talent and good-natured ways, there is something innately restless and difficult to understand about him. Perhaps, he had really wanted to learn about Uzushiogakure's seal system.

Because she thought it would look mean if she refused, she'd decided that it was really alright to help him and the second one came and went like that too. Then before she'd even realized what she was saying, she agreed to meet him for a third session. Throughout those, she'd found herself enjoying all that she'd practiced and promised not to forget.

Next, he'd insisted on treating her to some ramen because she helped him.

Oh, no, no, I wouldn't dream of it, that's what old classmates should do, don't treat me, I can get it when I want it, don't bother in the least, I have coupons, like lots and lots and lots of coupons, don't treat me, that's completely unnecessary, she'd said.

Yes, I really should, he'd told her.

And she'd kept trying to laugh and wave it off, but really, who says no to free ramen?

Then before she'd even scolded herself properly for getting all comfortable around him, a month had passed and they had taken to visiting the river, not saying much but just hanging out and chilling.

Mostly, she had sat there. In this village where one must accept adulthood and the pains of growing up fairly early, it had occurred to her that he seemed to be perpetually fluctuating between inchoate boyishness and transiting into formal adulthood. In those minutes, she wasn't sure if he'd already become a man or was something in between. At seventeen, he'd seemed almost the same as when he was nine, perpetually calm and either completely uninterested or totally taken by the world around him.

She'd watched how he was sitting in the grass, palms open and touching the soft green blades, because there didn't seem to be anything stopping him from lying back and closing his eyes, as if there was nothing in the world to be worried about.

She had been envying him just moments before he'd opened his mouth and asked if he could kiss her. Now the idiot had gone and properly ruined everything, despite them sitting so nicely by the river, drawing tortoises and fishes with sticks in the mud because they failed to find any real ones.

Come to think about it, it's her fault that he thinks he can be relaxed and laidback around her— that he can look at her now and ask that question. It's her own doing that she went fishing with him the first time and the other nine times following that. It's her bad that she forgot herself and agreed to go, just because he asked and she hadn't felt so free and happy in so long.

But to her credit, Kushina rationalises, she had resisted the urge to lie next to him. She's been careful enough, sitting curled with her knees tucked under her chin and her arms tight around her, no? It should have warned him quite sufficiently that she wasn't interested; wouldn't be interested.

Still, his question hangs in the air, her pulse threatening to thunder up her throat. Trying to clear it so that she can tell him to get lost, she decides to remain like that, defensive like an antsy armadillo. A very, very red armadillo.

And for a moment, she isn't sure that she doesn't want to kiss him.

She has always harbored an appreciation for his sanguine ways and cool headedness after that embarrassing incident when she was completely trapped and could only hope to be rescued (like what the hell was that all about, anyway?) and he did all the work in the end.

But if she is rash, hotheaded, and plain bullish in her stubborn ways, he proves to be quietly insistent, strong enough for others to feel comforted in his presence, and genuine enough to admit his failings and shortcomings.

So when he asks her again, as if she didn't hear him the first time, she isn't sure what to say.

She settles for an answer that comes off the top of her head. "I just ate ramen."

"So did I," he says after a pause.

He sits up a little straighter, crossing his legs like he is meditating with his teacher and turns to face her completely.

There is something very still and mellow about his ways—he is the sort who sometimes gets mistaken for being older than he is, if only because he is so mature in his thoughts and actions. He's still a kid at heart though—he can fall asleep with his feet in the river and he's the sort who wears a single jacket and never thinks of changing it until it nearly falls apart from repeated use.

"Ramen," she says after a difficult pause.

They had slurped up the noodles—she was more noisy than him—and drank all the soup—he was too full after two bowls, but she managed three.

"I just ate ramen."

"It was good, wasn't it?" His contemplation unnerves her.

"It was great," she says stupidly, and he smiles languidly at her.

She wishes that he wouldn't be so close, because she can see all his minor imperfections. That also means that he must be able to see hers, which are definitely far more damning than his.

And then she begins to cry, which is horrible really, because she cries noisily, sloppily and like a baby. You see, to cry properly, she has to let go over her ankles and un-tuck her knees and then she knows that she's achieved another level of messiness. Then again, she knows that she isn't exactly gorgeous even on her best days—she isn't one of those good-looking Yamanaka folk who look glamorous doing almost anything and can probably even cry prettily. Her face is still roundish, no matter how she looks at it, and her cheeks and nose must be as red as her hair by now. It makes her bawl even more.

Oh, and she's also the Jinchuriki.

"Damn it," she weeps, uprooting some grass in her despair. "I have garlic breath!"

The crickets continue to sing lustily as if nobody is trying to ruin their little bush soiree. If there are any of Aburame Shikuro's insects planted here and disguising themselves as common crickets, she'll shake them out, every single bug and have a word with him later.

In the meantime, she's got this other problem to deal with.

If he is startled that she has burst into tears for no good reason, he doesn't make remarks about it. He just puts his arm around her fearlessly, like she's a boy or his teammate or the good friends that they were for a short while before the Kyuubi.

Then he nods once, eyes still almost-closed with his smile. "The broth was nice, wasn't it?"

She wishes that she could understand him better, because he is both a friend and suddenly not quite that either. All this time while she'd sat, drawing deeper into herself and retreating for fear of being pushed away first, she didn't dare to ask if he considered her his girlfriend, let alone admit that she wanted him to.

Even now, she sits with a boy who may or may not be seeing her.

And that's why she's crying. She's bawling herself stupid because she wants him to kiss her, and she really, really, really wants to kiss him back. Then again, she doesn't really want him to because he'll just realize that she's not really like him. And her head is all bungled up and she's so confused, but there is one inescapable fact.

Everyone knows. Despite the quiet, private funeral that was held for Uzumaki Mito, the village was awash with news of the Shodaime Hokage's wife finally passing away from old age and news of a terminal illness. The legend and all the old stories had resurfaced back then, as gossip almost always does in the most inopportune moments.

The village knows— he knows. She knows that he knows.

"People like me," she hiccups eventually, "Don't belong with like people like you."

He laughs softly. Everything that he does seems to be so quiet and deliberate and _sure_. Now she wishes she would stop breathing so heavily and loudly and ruining this even more.

"I don't think it's like that at all." He says this in a matter-of-factly way, as if he doesn't know what the Kyuubi is or what it can do.

And that's when she begins to think that he is truly ignorant, which is why he is even sitting next to her and asking to kiss her, like there is no seal that lies between them that spreads palm-wide over her belly-button, claiming so much that she doesn't know where she starts and where she ends.

She opens her mouth to tell him that he's completely uninformed, but then he stops her.

"You're you," he says, because the bugger thinks he's figured it all out before her. "I'm me. We're all different people. We can choose to belong to wherever we want to belong to. We can choose to be with whoever we want to be with. That's why it's so interesting."

And then he folds his hand around her head and kisses her without asking again. Nor does he wait for her to really wipe away the tears and snot and horrible things that really shouldn't be part of a first kiss.

But he's so quick and so gentle about it that she just closes her eyes and accepts what he's said, wanting it to be the truth and not just a slice of idealism for children in playgrounds to sling about them like water bottles.

Yet, because of what he's done, it's no longer her fault.

It has ceased to be her fault that she became nine, or fourteen, then seventeen, because she's just a girl who's fallen in love with this boy a long time ago. It's not her fault that she's loved him for so long, all the way back to the moment when he'd appeared out of nowhere, grabbed her in his arms and proved to be the only one to notice her last-ditch, desperate attempts to be found.

And this time, someone's knocked on her door. This time, someone's finally found her.

For that absolutely breathless moment as he moves the teensiest bit away to look at her, she's nothing less than overjoyed.

Granted, she's been through some things that she can boast about to the world if she cared to, but then again, she's still a crybaby at the worst times with a temper more violent and quicker than the girls' sandals at roaches. She can't deny that the cursed creature lives as long as she does, but she's also a girl who's been kissed by the boy-man that the village looks upon with such favour and acceptance that she's renewed her determination to gain it like him too.

It makes her want to pump her fist into the air, curled fast and tight, but not in fear and indignation this time. Of course, she knows that it's something of a long-shot, now that the sealing ceremony is over and done with and Gramma is truly gone.

Still, the first boy that she ever really liked has voluntarily put his hands around her and kissed her.

For people like her, that's really saying something.

* * *

In between missions and the increasing weight of their responsibilities, they find time to talk and sit by the river.

They even manage to visit Gramma's empty house on a certain day of each year and these few times don't require her to break in because he shares with her a secret new teleportation technique that he's developed from all that research and the Nidaime's old records. She's impressed of course, but she doesn't admit it and he doesn't need her to voice it out when they're standing on Gramma's veranda, facing each other with the hugest pair of grins.

On other days, they join their other friends for all sorts of activities and together, they scandalize the ramen joint proprietors with their eating contests. The others haven't even bothered joking about the latest couple within their gang— some of their old friends had already started hooking up really early and anyway, most are used to that kind of thing starting in this circle.

Mikoto gets engaged at some point and whispers it to her during some outing.

Barely managing to keep her voice down, Kushina has to get up and start dancing and hopping all over the place, because it's so exciting and so good. Still, Kushina thinks that Uchiha Fugaku isn't fun-loving or even good enough for someone like Mikoto, although he's obviously a good ninja and Mikoto says that he's the next in line to lead the Uchiha clan. It's just unfair that the Uchiha always seem to get married off early, especially when she understands that Mikoto isn't getting engaged to the Aburame boy whom she has a soft spot for.

In any case, Kushina brings her two congratulatory presents. The first is a special hair pin from Kushina and the second is a pretty little wind-chime. It's not the same chime that Kushina remembers Ten Ru and Mikoto looking at years ago at the artisan street, but it's something that Ten Ru would have probably approved of, if she'd been alive to pick a present too.

It's a difficult life sometimes, what with the new outbreak of conflicts between the Hidden Mist and the Sand villages. The Leaf village is caught between this and there are rumours of a new war looming towards them as they face uncertain futures. Throughout this, more and more Konoha-nin are being sent out of the village. Certainly Minato, his teammates and Jiraiya are sent on increasingly dangerous missions and there are even times when Minato has to lead his team while Jiraiya handles separate tasks.

Because she's trying her hardest too, she does her missions to the best of her abilities. Still, fulfilling something of her childhood dreams about becoming a competent ninja now makes her ache on some of these days.

* * *

The first time they do it is not really how she envisions it.

Not that she ever did, because like their first kiss, their first time together is unexpected and almost strange when it begins.

Come to think of it, she should have expected it—anything that seemed completely out of the way or strange would have been likely to happen with people like them.

In the later months and years when the memory gets a bit hazy, she likes to attribute it to the seasonal winds. Those winds bring a feathery, relentless rain, and that always makes the usual training sessions a chore. It's also mostly because Minato returns from a particularly difficult mission where he claims to have met strangers from the future and a girl who had Kushina's red hair.

Of course, she doesn't believe him for one second and laughs it off. He doesn't insist either, only stares at her as he mumbles something about a whisker-faced, noisy boy that he met, his thoughts clearly elsewhere.

"People like me have disappeared," she says, and they both know that it's been a long time since they've met anyone has had this kind of conspicuous, red hair. Uzushiogakure is so utterly finished that nobody can say otherwise, and it's unlikely for it to ever be revived. Plenty of those with red-hair have gone extinct—there is no other word for it, really.

"It's just the way it is, for people like me," she says, after a bit of a pause. "We've had to go into hiding."

"Not you. You're with me," he says lightly. "So you're not hiding anywhere."

Then she has to smile at him because he has somehow made her believe that he's right about this, through all these years.

On this day, with the gales and the dark clouds, it seems silly to use the day training some more. With them stuck in this tiny little apartment until the sky clears up a bit, they end up mulling at a table, and she decides that cards will perk them both up.

It's a small apartment that he's managed to rent without spending too much of his pay, and she wonders if he ever gets as lonely as she does, since his parents are long dead like hers. She's visited this place plenty of times before, but this is the first time that the winds outside seem so discomforting.

She shuffles a deck and decides that they should entertain themselves somehow. But he's too good at cards, thanks to years of practice with Jiraiya-sensei.

"He was the one who taught me," Minato protests. "I'm not that badly-behaved!"

"Yeah, yeah, I'll bet you indulge in vices all the time."

Anyway, that's what she says, because she gets bored of losing.

Then the winds outside are howling and screaming and she gets up to open a window for the heck of it. It seems too quiet inside, anyway, since he's gone off to refill the teapot. When she does open the window, the leaves rush in and one lands up in his hair as he comes back to the table.

From where she is, she laughs because he's already too busy sitting down and re-arranging the teapot and cards. He's too engrossed to even notice what's at the back of his head.

She realizes that he would not notice even if another leaf got caught in his hair—he's considered a genius by so many in and beyond the village, but she's known him long and well enough to understand that he's a kid when it comes to all the normal things.

He's the sort who would go without combing his hair for days if he got caught up in some good book or game of chess. And then she chuckles a bit, relishing the look on Nara Shikaku's face when Minato had revealed halfway through a game that he actually didn't understand the rules of shogi and never once played by those.

"Please close the window," Minato says distractedly, back still turned as he shuffles what he can. "The cards will fly."

She shuts the window, scoots back to the kitchen table and stoops over him to take the leaf out.

But there is this awkward moment where he's startled and turns at the same time. Then his face is suddenly in her chest and she leaps away in embarrassment.

Her cheeks are already growing warm, because they are not in that kind of life-or-death situation. It's not one of those times when that sort of thing gets ignored and instantly forgotten as a kunai comes whizzing towards your heart and your teammate pushes you out of the way and you don't mind whoever touching your chest when they've basically saved your ass.

They've actually kissed quite a lot before, but like her, he gets awkward with his hands and they don't do much more than grin awkwardly at each other and resume staring at the river or making new plans to try her new recipe and take a look at the stuff that he's been working on.

Perhaps he understands that the situation is different too. He looks at her curiously, almost like he is trying to reason out some very technical concept in his head. There is a tiny wrinkle between his eyebrows, and it's clear that he's coming close to being confused.

But when he stands up slowly, pushing his chair back as he does, she finds that for all the sudden awkwardness, she isn't afraid.

He reaches to her, eyes trying hard to meet hers and his own cheeks flushed, and then he kisses her. Not the usual kind of peck on the lips and the soft flutter of his fingers on his shoulder, but a kiss that has his tongue parting her lips.

And then they are kissing. Properly kissing.

She wonders why they even got to this. For people like her, being direct is easier than creeping around the elephant in the room. People like her are supposed to be more direct if they want to talk about something. Besides, people like her don't usually feel awkward with others even when they are technically trapped in a small place with the torrential rains going on outside.

But she stops wondering because he's still at it. And then he's pushing her against the wall with a frightening, thrilling conviction that he's never physically demonstrated on her before. She doesn't know what to do except to clutch onto what she can of him, but she doesn't want to let go and regret not throwing herself into this single moment.

He gets a bit shaky suddenly, like he realises that they're in a territory that they don't know their way around and haven't charted before.

So she nods, trying to tell him that it's okay, because they're people who know each other so well that they could get utterly lost and still find their way out of a maze eventually.

There is only that pause when he unties the guard around her arm and puts his fingers into her hair, fumbling to find the cord that she has around her high pony tail. Not that she'll stop, she thinks that she's kept out of trouble for long enough and dammit, she's heard stuff from Mikoto and she wants to try this at least once in case she dies tomorrow and he goes off on a mission two days from now.

As always, she isn't even sure if he'll come back alive with his genin team, never mind that Kakashi is a young genius and was promoted to Chunin level just a few days ago. Those three kids rely on him, as she had relied on Gramma, her friends and teammates. People tend to rely on him and she's relied on him for a long time, so it's not supposed to be so frightening to admit here and now.

She signals to him that she wants the lights dimmed. It's awful to have this bright light shine on her—he looks fine, since his hair is so golden and soft. Not for her—her hair can't even pass off as a less offensive carroty shade in the most intense of twilight, and so she become hesitant and self-conscious within minutes.

They end up in his living room with the lights turned off and the occasional flash of distant lightning acting as the only illumination. Anyway, it's better when she doesn't feel too embarrassed that he'll see her imperfections. She is all too aware that he would see something repulsive in her if the light was stronger and the rains clouds hadn't gathered outside.

People like her are weird that way—boastful and proud and possibly petty. It's even when or because they feel threatened and that's how they seem so fearless. People like her never seem to have any hesitation, but now she is afraid. It was startling to watch the changes in her body and to hear people complimenting her, but all she can think about now is the lack of improvement regarding her trademark, roundish face.

Oh and there's also the Kyuubi somewhere in there, she thinks, but she feels sufficiently secure to find a bit of humour in that thought.

On the other hand, she reckons that puberty definitely favoured him, as most things and people around him always seem to. His light-coloured hair never darkened or became greasy as he grew older, and that somewhat girly, cherubic face sharpened into a man's while retaining its wonderful sensitivity.

"Darn you," she mutters in envy, and if he hears, he does not respond. Maybe he is too busy burying his face in her chest, and she decides to demonstrate her frustration by looping her fingers harder in his hair and tugging, nearly uprooting locks of his hair. Not that he even seems to notice.

Come to think of it, he has only complimented her hair once and he has never ever commented on her appearance ever again. Mostly, she has had to go on the gut instinct that he must be comfortable enough with how she looks for him to want her like this.

Maybe he was counting on her to never forget the incident when they were twelve, going on thirteen. Bastard was right of course, since it's hard to forget the one boy you're always going to love so much that it wrenches your gut and makes you want to cry.

Too late to get cold feet anyway, Kushina decides brashly, she's going to make sure she has fun while she dies trying to figure out what goes where.

Even as he undresses them both, she tries to go about it with her usual bravado, but it's a bit ineffective. Bluster doesn't work when it's all quiet like this and she can hear them both breathing, simply because she's a girl that way and there are too many things that she carries within her—all wrapped and disguised in her hotheadedness—that make her feel ugly when she glances into streams or draws water up from wells. That, or when she catches herself humming familiar tunes of old tribe songs that suddenly seem sinister and real despite her singing those almost subconsciously.

But then he suddenly stops kissing her and speaks in a breathless kind of voice that she has only ever heard when he's been back from some extended training.

"I think my head's going to explode." He says, and she hears his voice is shaking.

And then she can only smile and nod because her own heart is in her throat.

For now, she explores him to prevent him from taking the lead too quickly, and he seems to become a different person from what she's used to under her fingers and mouth. When he makes a strange, hissing sound and arches, she thinks that it's weird to be ever doing this with a boy—man—who seems so different from her.

The only thing that's similar for the both of them is that they've clearly never tried this before. It's funny, she thinks, because most kids must have tried this stuff when they were younger, but they never got round to it. On hindsight, he probably has to take care of himself like other shinobi, but it's fairly obvious that he's never tried this with other girls. He's almost clumsy about it, gingerly putting his weight above her and then groping her a bit too hard when she jokingly inquires if he hasn't been eating enough recently.

He was probably too busy training to learn this stuff or something, she thinks. That, or his teacher's many escapades and the following consequences of black-listing, death threats and battery dimmed the allure to someone as focused and blasé as Minato.

But they do it pretty hard anyway, after they manage to accomplish the main deed. Of course, he nearly freaks out about the pain that she experiences.

To her, it's honestly quite temporary and nothing all that bad, considering what she's been through. To him, he probably believes that he's killed her.

"You're bleeding," he says when he dares to look down, brows knit in horrified consternation.

"Course I am!" She almost laughs at the obviousness of it and the complete lack of imagination on his part. It was explained during that health class when the boys were brought into another classroom—she'd somehow assumed that they were told the same things about puberty and gross stuff like that.

"I'll help clean up later or something," she tells him, then begins to move a bit, testing out the new presence within her. "No worries."

"No, not that!" And somehow, he actually looks ready to cry. "I'm hurting you!"

She thinks about it for a second, squinting up at him. Then she takes a wager that she'll get used to the pain or something. "Nah. Come on, let's get going."

After that, it actually gets pretty good. All this, all while the rain goes on outside.

When he comes in her because he's fumbling too much to know what to do in time, he swears softly.

He wasn't supposed to end up doing this, but she isn't too freaked out and actually laughs, because she realizes that she's never heard him swear before.

"Shit," he says again, and she sees that he's all pale even in this dim lighting. Actually, he looks really, really scared, and his voice has a different hoarseness than before. "What do I do now?"

"Oh well," she says, because she has no idea either.

And so they continue and then do it again once more, just to make sure that they've got the hang of it.

If only she could have peered into the window of the next morning, she would have known that they would be on their knees, scrubbing at his living room floor. Then she would have laughed right now, clinging harder onto him and breathing deep into his shoulder while folding herself around him.

Had she owned some gift of omniscience, she would have foreseen her future stint at the hospital as a part-time medic and known that her inability to focus her chakra the way healing required would get her delegated to watch out for the newborns. She would have better understood the rains on this night and recognized the strange tattoo it set in her body, her future self staring at the twenty-something cots through a display window and wondering aloud as to why so many babies were born during wet seasons.

Then she would have looked up at him now and informed him that they had done well to try this, just because there were only so many card games that one could play. Had she possessed the foresight, she would have known that they did end up laughing about their first time in the morning, as they did for the subsequent weeks, months and years to come.

But she does not have the ability to gaze into a future that they currently doubt, and so she does not know that she should hug him just that little bit tighter and cast away all worries.

In fact, she can't think of anything beyond the here and now. Within the next hour, the thrill of their new experience together dissipates in the most dismayingly quick way. Instead of the usual sap that the romance novels keep putting out, they're basically looking at each other and realizing that they've been bloody stupid—kids, really.

While she hasn't heard him talk about his dreams and aspirations ever since they were children, she's heard substantial talk that he will be moving up the village's ranks. Anyway, she knows him well enough to know that his dream has never changed.

As for her—well, for starters, she has this upcoming mission that she should probably train harder for and get prepared to go on.

Hanging between and above them is that horrible, unspoken sword. The songs of the fox grow loud in her head, weaving a maddening medley with the thought of a child with red hair, red lips and feral eyes. It is completely illogical, because this isn't hereditary—at least, that's what they said when she went through the Sealing ceremony.

She's the first to broach the topic while they try to fall asleep.

"Er— if something—," she pauses, stammering a bit. "Something—happens, and maybe—eh—,"

She curses eventually and shuts her eyes, feeling desperate enough to pretend to snore.

He's silent for a long while.

Then he somehow returns to being that irritatingly logical, coolheaded person again and props himself up on an elbow to look at her.

"I think you'd better marry me," he says.

It's the tenderness in his voice that makes her eyes snap open, and even though she's still frozen in shock, she does let him turn her back to him so that she can see him smiling.

It's when she thinks to herself that there will never be any other person like him.

* * *

For Minato and her, rainy days make them share a private laugh.

But the exceptionally rainy days make Jiraiya-sensei pensive and tired. Although he clearly enjoys visiting the two of them and bearing gifts from his travels, his chatter trickles off whenever the drizzle trots into a steady, seemingly-permanent downpour.

Normally when he's with his prized pupil, Jiraiya is always young, energetic and almost irrepressible. He sings out his sentences, peppers his diction with onomatopoeia that she would have associated with children's speech patterns, and the former teacher and student discuss some mind-boggling technique like they are young boys recently enrolled in the Academy.

The two of them are quite similar in some sense—all completely and utterly gifted in the shinobi arts but quite helpless in other things that would only require relatively common sense. At least, Minato claims that Jiraiya was the one who encouraged him to eat out all the time because it was too much of a hassle to cook.

Then when the rain comes, Jiraiya goes to sit by the same window that she opened all that time ago. When it pours and becomes grey, he doesn't seem to talk much anymore, which is remarkable, now that she thinks about it. She's not sure why, but the red markings beneath his sharp, often calculating eyes have pushed vertically on those increasingly haggard cheeks, making it look like there are bloody tears streaking down.

In those moments, she thinks that he almost looks his age. But then Minato and she have aged too, because that's just the way it is and the way that it should be.

There is a heavily-guarded office with all sorts of libraries and other guarded zones at the peak of the Hokage tower, but there's their house right below it where a man and his wife can be exactly as they please.

He has his study and a storeroom where he keeps the kunai and other items that he tinkers with. In the corner of the living room, there is the little cactus that Biwako gave her so many years ago and the now humongous leafy plant with its fuzzy, yellow-tinged pointy leaves.

For her, she has bright orange curtains fluttering against the skies and a fridge that can hold as much meat as she can buy, so Mikoto and her little boy can come over for lunch anytime and Kushina can cook to her heart's content.

Sometimes, she wonders why things have become the way they are, what with her missions taking a backseat and her life shrinking to the walls of their new home. But she's satisfied because there are always enough things to do and lots of assignments that she takes.

Her husband is now the Yondaime Hokage, a new coat with a beautiful flame motif hanging in the tower where he works at, his face carved on a rock façade that a little girl had once crept past uncomfortably because she felt like an outsider then.

Not that he likes it much— he says that it's a bit cheesy. But as the Sandaime Hokage insists, if it's tradition, it's tradition.

She always laughs and points it out to him when they pass by, just to make him scratch his head awkwardly and smile just like the boy whom she fell in love with all those years ago.

That boy might often be somewhere else now, because there's no space for a kid in an office that the Anbu report to on a sometimes hourly basis; where her husband's bodyguards are lethally efficient, one shooting senbon with a projectile force strong enough to kill the first few assassins that come.

But that's just the way it is when the years have come and gone and she is who she is and that boy has become a man whom she loves without a single question to her mind.

Still, it's three more years before the curves on her body hang even more full and promising with child.

By then, they've both grown up a little more and gone through all forms of silly squabbles. They've quarrelled about where to hang the clothes, how they're going to split the laundry, who's supposed to take out the trash and whose job it is to refill the teapots.

They've had to sit down and discuss why the toilet seat can't be up or down or however the default is supposed to be, and why the food is so bland or too salty and whether he has the right to comment at all when he eats everything anyway. Then they've argued whether they should have sex once every three days or only when both of them feel like it, whether they should pool their accounts, and whether the windows need to be closed when the rain comes.

She always wins.

Sometimes, her victory comes from sheer stubbornness and pure insistence. Mostly, it comes through ignoring his use of cool-headed logic .

"But you _know_ that I'm right," he likes to say and it makes her argue even more because she does know and it's bloody annoying anyway.

And then there are some strange occasions when she has taken to yelling or stamping her feet like the stupid brat that she's supposed to have grown out and away from. She never means to, but it's because he just doesn't seem to understand why she's getting so worked up in those particular occasions. That's when he comes close to yelling too, because as a man, he has his pride, and sometimes, they've all just had a bad day and don't know how to deal with it except to take it out on each other like that.

And sometimes, even though she hates the thought of arguing with him while trying not to eat her snot, she cries. She ends up crying because she doesn't know how to explain that she so wanted him to be punctual on this particular day and that the stew that she tried her best to make was already bad without it having to go cold from his tardiness.

He always loses. She always wins. And then they have make-up sex.

They've also been through that awful period when they were barely speaking; when she was wondering whether his heart had changed or whether he'd woken up and realized that he was lying next to a plain, unexceptional woman with horribly, horribly red hair and something equally unlovable within her.

Worse yet, they went through that period when neither of them could bear being in the same room.

There was that one long, awful week. Then, they avoided each other like the most disinterested of housemates, the kind typical in temporary tenancy arrangements.

And for all the days of that week, she was so wound up that there didn't seem to be a new day or a new chance when he camped out in his office. On those days, she made meals for just one, angry enough to try keeping up her energy in case he did come back and she could pound him into a pulp, but too angry to for her to storm up to him and get him back to where he actually belonged.

On that occasion, it had taken a door-banging, highly-nonplussed Jiraiya-sensei, three wise-cracking toad summons, and a few other concerned friends to force them to talk.

And in between, there were all those missions that took her husband away for months at an end and she was left worrying herself sick if he was dead, alive or injured in a ditch somewhere.

To be honest, she never truly stops wondering if he will finally see the unspeakable monstrosity within her, even after they make up each time. But each time, he's explained things to her in a way that makes the doubt as good as melt away. He's taken her to him and held her again.

And because this is a marriage and because she loves him more than she'll ever love anything or anyone, she's conceded (fully admitted) that there were a few (many) times when she might have (was) probably (absolutely) been mistaken (clearly wrong).

By the time she starts feeling bloated, unusually heavy and definitely all kinds of sick one morning, they've rubbed off each other a little and she's learned to be even calmer and a little more in control of her temper and emotions. But it's him who almost spills the soup when she confirms that he's gone and knocked her up properly.

She runs back into their house on a Wednesday afternoon when she's back from the doctor's and the dark-haired, fair-skinned Hyuuga has literally looked into her and convinced her that those eyes are definitely not mistaken.

Her husband being who he is has taken a day off work to cook something nourishing for her. If he had believed that she was under the weather, he is most certainly mistaken.

"I'm going to be a mother," she exclaims.

He's heard her coming in and pops out of the kitchen in his house slippers and a bowl of something and a ladle clutched between his mittens. "What?"

"I'm going to be a mother!" she repeats, taking just one step closer. "A mother, a mother!"

There is this long, huge pause and she's excited and scared and all of so many things, but there is one thing that she doesn't have—there is no doubt that she wants this child.

"I'm going to be a mother." This time, there is a new decisiveness in her voice.

"A-and I'm going to be a," he swallows, holding onto his cooking things quite commendably. "A father!"

"A mother!"

"A father!" He is blinking, a smile spilling wide and golden onto his face. Like he can't believe it either, he takes one step towards her, voice soaring like a kite without its string. "A father!"

Then she is running to him, pressing herself into an embrace that he only manages to return with his chest, seeing that he is still wearing those cooking mittens and holding some broth that was supposed to be good for flu immunity and all that nonsense that she is definitely, definitely not suffering from.

With him, she's a little more organized, more politically correct and more patient. In fact, she's fairly certain that she's grown up and become a better person because of her husband, whereas she's a hundred percent sure that he's mostly the same person.

She treasures him more for that.

* * *

When Mikoto visits with Itachi a few months later, Kushina finds that the five year old is now speaking in incredibly proper and sophisticated sentences.

He doesn't even make a mess of the cake that Kushina sets out for him and she marvels at how he finds a bit of paper, a pencil and draws cat paw prints quietly in a corner while his mother talks to her.

It's funny really, because Kushina did not think about how she and Mikoto would have survived for so long in a world where deaths came easily and flew through windows like flies. And Mikoto has changed without Kushina knowing it, her face a bit wan and her beauty a darker, more silent one that the two girls of the past would not have recognised.

When Kushina asks about her husband and the Uchiha Clan's general well-being, her friend just nods and smiles in that new, vague way. She can't blame Mikoto though, because Kushina's heard enough about Fugaku to know how strict his ways are and that Mikoto herself is expecting a second child.

"I guess we both got busy at the same time," Kushina grins. "I'm not sure what the final plan is, but maybe I'll get to see you again before this fellow-" she pats her swollen belly, "-gets a-kicking."

"I hope so," Mikoto smiles.

Then she looks over at her first son drawing the same cat paw over and over again, because he is apparently not satisfied with all his erstwhile attempts.

When Kushina springs up and offers to find him other toys, he merely blinks at her with the look of one who does not understand why she wants to distract him from his task.

She thinks it's funny that such a little boy is already so beautiful and so grown-up in his gaze. His mother was serene enough, back in the day when Kushina was still actively pummeling whoever who joked about her hair, but Mikoto has never seemed half as severe as her little boy.

So Kushina invites them to shed the house slippers and she tries to make the serious child laugh by walking on the walls in mimicry of lizards. He does smile and laugh a bit, which she isn't surprised about. What does surprise her however, is little Itachi's ability to use chakra and walk on the walls too.

He does it with such polish and finesse, so nonchalant and unaware that ten year olds would have struggled to do the same. And that's when Kushina manages to stop gaping and asks if Mikoto knew about that.

"Yes, well," Mikoto says hesitantly, apparently a bit uncomfortable about her child's abilities.

She opens her mouth, looking like she wants to talk about something, but then she shuts it again and shakes her head, that wince on her lips more like a grimace than a smile.

It reminds Kushina that the years have changed something about her best friend too.

Perhaps it was the marriage that Mikoto had little say in, or motherhood. But whatever it is, it's changed the way that they might have talked about anything or everything, no holds barred, two girls who had found each other in a big, wide world.

"He's seen his father some times and tries to mimic." That's all Mikoto says about it.

Then her friend gathers up the boy, who doesn't need to be shooed but stands up gracefully on his own and go gets his sandals. Even when his mother tells him that they're not in a hurry, he only looks up at her with a diffident tilt of his chin. Not in a disrespectful way, no, but almost as if he's sizing his own mother up.

It makes the kind of baby talk that Kushina would have liked to coo at that lovely face die on the tip of her tongue.

"Fortunately or not, they have a very rare kind of genius on their hands," is what Minato concludes, when Kushina regales the incident to him. He touches her belly gently, cupping his palm to mirror her flesh's curvature. "I wonder what our child will be like."

He spends every hour that he can spare with his cheek and ear pressed against her growing bump, talking quietly to the child even when she has fallen asleep in their bed.

And now that she's with his child, she finds the same boy whom she met those years ago.

Minato seems to develop the propensity to come home from the Hokage's office, feet light and pattering like a hungry cat's, alert like he's only just starting to go to work. He drops those heavy robes with a carelessness that she has never seen like this, then rushes to her while becoming that young boy again.

He is excited, uncharacteristically talkative, hopeful, anxious, wonderfully protective. It's when she knows that for all their implicit understanding that her becoming pregnant would pose all its problems, they had both longed very deeply for this child.

They inform whoever they have to, then set a day to listen to what the Sandaime Hokage needs to say. Biwako ends up clucking her tongue all the time when Kushina gets distracted by the look in Minato's face as he gets up and tells her that he'll make sure everything is prepared.

But Kushina can't help it, she's wondering about the changes in Minato and the changes in her as well and she believes that becoming parents will make them the best people that they could ever hope to be.

And when the doctor who visits tells them that the baby's healthy and hints to them that it's probably going to be a boy, she sees Minato beam and laugh.

It's been a long few months with her being confined in the house for most hours of each day, all because Biwako has warned her of the dangers of being discovered. Apart from Mikoto who happened to visit then, nobody else knows of Kushina's pregnancy.

Still, Mikoto has been requested not to tell anyone and Kushina knows that she won't. All this secrecy isn't great for Kushina's style though, and being cooped in at home for months has been terribly trying, as Minato has probably found.

But it was all worth it and all their little arguments are forgiven and completely forgotten now as she springs up from the chair, her nervousness broken from the good news that her child is healthy.

"And a boy too, yahoo!"

She whoops and cheers for a few more seconds and then has to steady herself. She's forced back into her seat, even as her husband panics and chides her for being too hyperactive even with that heavy body of hers.

Later, when she's had more time to gather her thoughts, she tells her husband that she wants a boy who will be just like his father.

What she doesn't tell him is that she prays to anyone who's listening when she takes off her mantle of cheerfulness and robust energy every night; that she prays with a desperate kind of longing that her child will be healthy and happy.

* * *

One night, he comes back quite late and wakes her up by laying a kiss softly on her cheek.

She wakes up even though he didn't intend for it and then he smiles sheepishly at her. They spend a few seconds like that in the darkness of this bedroom, with him kneeling at the side of their bed and watching over her and the child growing in her.

But there's something—she attributes it to the hormones—and he senses it too.

So when he takes off that heavy cloak and all of Konoha's affairs off his shoulder, slipping into the bed, she's already ready with her heart pounding, her skin tingling, her body aching to take him.

In her mind, all the time that they've spent together is an amalgamation of this moment, and with his child already growing in her and her body changing again, she believes that he has more than shaped her.

He's insisted that she rest as much as possible, but she's pregnant, not frigid, dammit. She knows how much she's missed this as soon as he's done with his protests, especially since she shuts him up anyway.

Then she's on her hands and knees, on their bed, breathing and living again, his body moving and pushing into and against her, his breath tiny clouds of mist and his voice strained as he murmurs and whispers something that she can't really hear.

He has to be careful for them, even if she's so needy and so desperate for him that she's immediately that close. But there is that honeyed sensation of her name, its syllables broken and whispered like secrets against her ear because nobody else can share this, mist seeping from his lips.

And she's so sensitive now and just a sly brush of his calloused fingers against her makes her tingle like there are a hundred little bells strung on her everywhere. Then she's reaching out and trying to hold onto whatever that she can, pink in her cheeks with heat flaring and coiling in her again.

He must sense this too and so he settles on her, kissing every inch and surface of her. They've had moments in the past when he was too cautious, too scared of something; too worried for her. This shouldn't be one of them, she thinks, even if it's the way he always seems these days. It's just the way it is, but they know what they're doing and all she wants is to be here with him.

When he's satisfied and she lets go of the last bit of control too, she breathes deeply into the night air, the way he fills this room with her presence and drowns out all the echoes of the beast tapping its claws against the seal, waiting for her to get weaker.

They've already made plans and she knows that it's soon.

For now though, she sinks back into him, finding her favourite corner of him where she can tip her chin on his shoulder and kiss the underside of his jaw.

It's another new and funny experience, because her body is all blundering and extremely clumsy, obviously swollen at her waist, breasts and calves, where it's been a challenge walking as fast as she would like to these days.

But as always, he tucks them both in and puts his arm around her.

And even in the darkness, no matter what time it is or how hard the day's been, she can feel him smiling.

* * *

On another day, she laughs silently to herself when she overhears him talking to his former teacher and long-time father figure in the living room outside.

It's good to have a visitor, she thinks. It was getting unbearable, what with her feeling increasingly trapped in the house without anyone to talk to during Minato's long working hours.

Now that Jiraiya has come back from all his travels and has plenty of funny little anecdotes to share, the house is filled with more cheer than before and she reckons that it's good that Minato is still so close to the Toad Sage.

"I really, really want to read it," Kushina hears him telling his teacher. "Did it take you long to complete it?"

"Eh— longer than my usual novels, I guess."

For weeks, Minato becomes hooked on that novel, and he reads it compulsively during his lunch breaks and even after the paperwork is done and he's back from the office.

He barely lets her have a peek at it and so she accuses him of reading steamy stories.

'The tale of the Gutsy Ninja' sounds far too much like a compilation of sexcapades to her mind, especially considering what the Toad Sage is capable of. Overall, Minato's informing her that Jiraiya-sensei recently completed a novel is not an announcement without the warning bells in her head sounding at top volume.

Still, everybody loves a good sensational story and she has run out of interesting things to do at least a week ago.

"If you're reading porn, you should share it!" she demands, her endless hair getting all over them as she leans over him in their bed. Artfully, he had dodged her attempts to snatch it even as he continues to read with that uncharacteristic absent-mindedness.

"It's not porn," he mumbles, preoccupied with flipping a page.

She pouts, folding her arms. "Even if we can't do it now, at least involve me a little!"

But he shushes her and her attempts to sneak the book from him fails each single time. She finds that she actually has nothing better to do and keeps wheedling, so in the end, he speeds up and finally passes it on to her.

By the fourth chapter, she's sure that loves the book as much as her husband does. It is clichéd, of course, idealistic and with a strange, idiosyncratic main character who seems far too much like Jiraiya for her to feel entirely comfortable.

I mean, she thinks, what does the gutsy ninja actually do when he's visiting those hot springs? And why are there so many hot spring towns that the gutsy ninja passes through? Actually, thinking about it, why is there this huge time leap in chapter twelve and thirteen after he's been rejected by his gorgeous childhood friend and she ignores his long-standing affections and gets engaged to marry some other fellow?

But there is something pure about the storyline and plot development—something comical, endearing, simple and entertaining about the main character.

There's something honest, she realises, something wonderful and childlike and _good_.

So by the time she finishes the book with a tiny sigh, it's already past midnight and Minato is breathing steadily in deep sleep. Guiltily, she looks at the clock and begins to turn off the small light that permitted her to read late into the night, along with her husband's indulgence.

She lies back into the pillows, thinking about everything that she's read and the catchphrase that sticks particularly well in her mind. And that's when her eyes blink wide open and she finds that she must, must wake him up in her excitement, never mind that it's already a Monday and he has work in a few hours.

She kisses his cheek excitedly and tells him, "I have a name in mind."

"Okay," he mumbles, head turning back down into the pillow. "Love you too."

She doesn't let go of him. "Jiraiya-sensei will approve."

"Eh?" he says sleepily, turning over and his eyelids beginning to flutter shut again. Still, his large, warm hand finds its way to her belly and he strokes the obviously curved surface. It's a habit that he's cultivated over these months and yet, he seems to find as much comfort as her with these healing patterns. "What name?"

She smiles, blinking back the sudden tears in her eyes. "Let's name him Naruto."

* * *

The thing about tasting one good slice of life is that you get played into wanting it to last forever.

She knows that the consciousness is already slipping from her and she bites her lips and tongue, forcing herself to keep alert. It's the only part of her that she can really move, her pulse erratic and crazily fast, but she'll be damned if someone hurts her baby on her watch.

Thank God for her husband, she thinks, who brought her back and thought to have her placed her just so.

She can't move her head, but then she doesn't want to look anywhere else from where she lies. She makes sure that she doesn't blink too often, just so she can look at their boy and force herself to stay awake for as long as possible to watch over him.

But there's a dread that builds cold and unrelentingly in the air and the heavy coat and its emblem of finger-like flames and the bold words marking its length has already been flung on. For people like her, it's easy to recognise all of fear that he disguises.

Even as he set his star-pointed kunai in the corner, she understands that he's already forced himself to plan the next few steps. The rage in his eyes has not subsided, but it's melted into something else— a ruthlessness, deliberation and cunning.

And that's precisely what he'll need, she realizes, because he's got no other chance of returning to even see her die next to their newborn son. And they both know she's going to die, seal broken and beast ripped right out of her, they both know it and they know it's very soon.

There was that old gentleness as he deposited her aching, ruined body next to Naruto. She knows it, because it's everything that she remembered as a girl of thirteen, looking up into the face of the boy who believed in her and let her fight her own battles. But that smile in her memory of him is nowhere to be found and his eyes have morphed into something else as he takes a long look at them.

She knows what he wants to do, because she understands that he's forcing himself to appear calm— to be calm— and to protect something that's bigger and represents something greater than what everything in this hideaway is. It's a sacrifice that he makes, but it's a sacrifice that was made before. She understands perfectly well, even if she would have cried out against the injustice of this.

He says he'll be back in a flash and then he's gone.

That's just the way it is, she thinks, as bittersweet as it has always been and always must be.

The boy has hair like Minato's, the type that she wants to run her fingers through and frame like corn ears.

He has my round face, she'd planned to declare to her husband, he's got whiskers like a kitty's that I'll kiss every day until he complains that it's too embarrassing.

But then she had been planning to bring him to visit Gramma's river and her old instructor too. She had wanted to watch him grow up, wanted so many things that she can probably never see now.

This is not supposed to be happening now, Kushina thinks, remembering the way she'd wept into Gramma's lap.

She's not supposed to be watching the child breathe as she won't be able to in a matter of minutes; she's not supposed to be lying here, knowing that the sand-glass has already been tipped and there are only so many grains left in the upper vial. It wasn't supposed to happen like this. She had already come up with all sorts of new recipes in the past few months, preparing all sorts of things and intending to teach everything to their boy.

You were supposed to clap your hands at those wooden animal toys, she thinks, then he and I were supposed to watch you play and grow every day.

I was supposed to tell you about the plants in the living room, she thinks, and you were supposed to laugh and tell me that I was such a hopeless, silly mum.

You were the one who was going to make us all those new days and new chances and my new family in Konoha. I was going to ask you if you would have found it embarrassing if you'd taken after me with my red hair.

You were supposed to teach me how to live as your mother.

Time—my strength wasn't supposed to play me.

Life wasn't supposed to play me.

And for that moment, there's nothing that Kushina can do but to be by the child's side and swear to keep awake.

She does it.

When Minato returns as he says he would, she's horrified to look into his eyes, see the unmasked desperation in them and watch him cry and beg as she's never heard him do before. To some extent, they've both failed, but in all respects, they've succeeded in doing their best.

He shouldn't be begging her, she thinks, because she's the one who's forced herself onto her knees, her chakra chains holding her up and what she can manage but won't be able to for long. Then they end up in another argument, because they are who they are; people like them can't help it and some things never change.

She doesn't know how to distill all of her experiences into words, those years of loneliness and pain, but then she looks into his face and understands that he _knows_. He may not understand every moment of her life and every dream that she's ever had, but he gets it anyway because he's knows how and what it takes to heal people like her.

And that's the thing about being all that she's become, because she's been shaped by every one of those people, experiences and him.

She just closes her eyes and accepts what he's said, not merely wanting it to be the truth, but willing it to be. This time, she doesn't let herself believe that it's a candy cane of idealism but a saving grace in the child at the playground when that somebody has yet to come and find him.

As the beast's claw comes smashing in like a steel ball to demolish old buildings, they've leapt into the air together, pierrots on the strings of their combined wills. She hears it in her bones, that scrapping, hyena's madness curdling the air, but they're prepared for it as they've always been and have now proven to be.

Of course he was right. He's right as usual. Like he used to say all the time, she _knows _that he's right.

That much, she's used to.

And there's their child, who sleeps on as if he can't hear anything, and perhaps he really can't because Minato's put him into a deep slumber; God help them both, she gasps, let him remain that way until help comes.

She can't help the tears even though she hates the thought of it. It's all because she has only just begun and laid eyes on a love that she has never known even with Minato, because it took all of him to create this new chapter that can never be now.

Then Minato's really close behind her like he always was when he used to sneak back during the lunch hours and see what she was cooking for dinner. She had laughingly pushed him away then, telling him not to get all those funny ideas from his sensei, still covertly enjoying his body shielding hers as she now protects their child together with him. It's almost like one of those afternoons, except that she can taste her blood and feel the cloying warmth of his dripping down his mouth.

And this time, she won't push away.

Her words ring with everything that has defined her from the start to the end. She knows that one of these days, Naruto will hear them, somehow, some way, when he needs to the most.

For now, she's only just a tad ashamed about how she steals all the thunder from the boy's father with her rambling on and on and never giving him much of a chance to get a word in. It's payback anyway, she decides, for the time when she'd announced that she would be the first female Hokage and he subsequently stole her thunder. She would have liked to nag more at their son, but that's just the way it is and that's just the way it's got to be.

In the end she chokes up, unable to really remember what else she's left out. All she knows is that she loves their boy.

It's growing so dark and she's too cold to tremble now, but it's like she and Minato are lying in the dark, warm and tucked in, her head against her favourite corner of him as she feels him smile that old smile and say, "As your father, I agree with everything your noisy mother says."

That's the thing about life, dropping in when it liked, but leaving exactly when it had to.

That much, she's used to.

It wasn't easy, but after all these years and all that struggling, she's finally given up telling herself that she's supposed to be smarter, faster, stronger and better than whatever this is.

You see, in the end, all she could ever do was to keep hoping and straining with every fiber of her being for a new day and a new chance

For people like her son, they'll have to try and be better than what others think they are. But it'll be fine, because she's been there and done that and she believes in the boy, as Minato does.

For people who've survived in this world and continue to live in this village, they can't and won't possibly have a better place to call home and to fight for. And that she also knows, because she found a home here in the end.

For people like Gramma and Minato, all that's left is a legacy of love and really, she hopes that every scared, resentful little child who walks past the Hokage mountain will look up and understand that eventually.

For people like her, all that's been and come to pass is more than what she could have ever asked for.

* * *

_Waiting is wasting, for people like me_

* * *

**Post ****A/N: **

**Of all the Naruto characters, I just couldn't believe how much I identified with Kushina.**

** It made me want to tell her story, but trying to piece every bit of information from the manga and anime together to make sense of things made me appreciate all these years of the Naruto story even more. ****Of course, true to how I always seem to operate, this one-shot turned out to be morethanaoneshot.**

**Anyway, this has proven to be so enjoyable and so heart-wrenching and so wonderful for me. I sincerely hope that everybody who reads it will identify with the characters like I did and like what's been put out.**

**Cheers to Kishimoto and the animation studio staff's efforts in bringing these characters so close to our hearts!**

******I appreciate all comments and reviews, so m**ake my day, R&R please!


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